Hunting The Muse

SARS Tracking

Here's a morbid look at dynamic web services and data analysis. It's a web page that automatically loads the latest SARS data, graphs it, and predicts trends. I think all the text at the bottom is dynamically generated, too.

Also an example of how math isn't necessarily connected to reality. It's pretty well-expected that this "epidemic" will start to burn itself out just like any other virus, after peaking. This doesn't make an attempt to predict that curve, though; it only predicts trends off of the data it has. Therefore it's predicting 10 million SARS deaths by October.

But there's plenty of other data - like the percent of people that catch it that die. Evidently it's lower than influenza (both in terms of mortality and communicability) and there's no worldwide flu panic every year. Outside of school boards, that is.

Posted by Curt at April 7, 2003 09:16 PM