About

About the Author

My name is Bob Pagano. I live in the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, Arizona. I am the sole author of the writings, graphs, and projections on this website. I use “we” on this website to include you, the reader.

By way of full disclosure, I have no epidemiological education or experience. Please scrutinize the material on this website thoroughly. Do not accept it on faith. If you identify errors or shortcomings please bring them to my attention.

What I do have to offer is 35 years of experience analyzing, digesting and presenting technical data. I hope you find something of value to you on this website.

About the Code

The Covid-19 Modeling code is Python [1] code. The code downloads data from various sites, calculates local mortality rates (US only), generates SIR model [2] data, projects Covid-19 deaths into the future, plots the data using plotly [3], and uploads the data to GitHub [4] where it is linked to my WordPress [5] website. This process takes approximately 30 minutes to run, approximately 25 minutes of which is consumed by saving html format plotly files and uploading the same to GitHub.

Motivation

In early April 2020, I began looking at daily Covid-19 confirmed case and deaths data for the US and other countries. I also began looking regularly at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation’s (IHME) [6] data and projections.

As I person who had taught himself Python programming within the last year, I decided to take up the macabre hobby of mining and plotting publicly available data on Covid-19 caused illness and death. After reading K. Systrom’s Covid-19 blogs [7] and watching his rt.live [8] website take shape I began programming my own SIR model and thinking about ways to forecast the future of the virus using inadequate data and a whole lot of ignorance.

In July, after looking briefly at other Covid-19 modeling websites and taking inspiration in particular from Y. Gu’s excellent work [9], I decided to push forward with my own Covid-19 projections and make my work presentable so that I could share it with family and friends. Both my wife and my son build websites for hire and in September my wife got me a url, set up with WordPress got me started building this website.

From October 1st, 2020, through today, I have updated the plots on this website daily for anyone with interest. I hope that soon, Covid-19 data will be of interest only to researchers, to learn from, to prevent illness and loss of life in our future.

Two Cents

We can go on living and working in the age of Covid-19. There are numerous peoples in places around the world showing us ways to do so. Let’s learn together so that we can be together again.

Curriculum Vitae

Education
Employment
Patents
Publications

References

[1] https://python.org
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology
[3] https://plotly.com
[4] https://github.com
[5] https://wordpress.org
[6] https://covid19.healthdata.org
[6] https://systrom.com/blog/predicting-coronavirus-cases
[7] https://rt.live
[8] https://covid19-projections.com