Juan Convers

Almost two years ago I created a dashboard to track the Covid-19 cases based on data provided by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. When I deployed that little application, I thought it would only be useful for a couple of months.

Almost two years later, it is still useful for tracking cases in different countries and following trends at the national or global level. In the different podcasts I follow, they have mentioned in the last couple of weeks that the omicron variant is different, in the sense that it is way much more contagious, but does not affect the lungs in the same way as the previous variants did.

Last night I was checking my dashboard and indeed the number of cases has skyrocketed, more than with any other variant. Fortunately the number of deaths associated with the virus has remained stable as you can see above. It is still true that this huge number of cases will necessarily add additional stress on health care systems around the world.

Although we are all sick to death of this pandemic, we must continue to get vaccinated and take protective measures to avoid the virus as much as possible.