A funny — and by funny, I mean sad — thing has happened. Recently the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) has been analyzing data from the patchwork implementation of mask requirements in Kansas. They came to a conclusion that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone: masks help. They published a chart showing this. A right-wing propaganda publication got ahold of this, and claimed the numbers were “doctored” because there were two-different Y-axes.

I set about to analyze the data myself from public sources, and produced graphs of various kinds using a single Y-axis and supporting the idea that the graphs were not, in fact, doctored. Here’s one graph that’s showing that:

In order to do that, I had imported COVID-19 data from various public sources. Many states in the US are large enough to have significant variation in COVID-19 conditions, and many of the source people look at don’t show county-level data over time. I wanted to do that.

Eventually, I wrote covid19db, which ingests data from a number of public sources and generates a SQLite database file. Using Github Actions, this file is automatically updated every morning and available for download. Or, you can download the code and generate a database yourself locally.

Then, I wrote covid19ks, which generates various pretty graphs covering the data. These graphs, incidentally, turn out to highlight just how poorly the United States is doing compared to the rest of the industrialized world.

I hope that these resources, and especially covid19db, might be useful to others that would like to analyze the data. The code isn’t the prettiest since it was done in a hurry, but I think that functionally this is useful.