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Fair Warning - Benefits, musical gaps, and R

Hello! I've been waiting for an announcement to happen and ran out of time to write the newsletter. A
Fair Warning
Fair Warning - Benefits, musical gaps, and R
By Sophie Warnes • Issue #111 • View online
Hello! I’ve been waiting for an announcement to happen and ran out of time to write the newsletter. Anyway, now it has! In a couple of weeks I’m leaving my job at the Office for National Statistics and joining the Wall Street Journal as Visuals Strategy Editor.
I am beyond excited to start, and I’m also obviously excited about moving to New York when I can. Don’t worry, Fair Warning won’t change, but might become a bit more intermittent as I get used to the challenges and demands of a new role, so please bear with :)
Some fun/interesting non-data stuff I’ve seen this week:

On the home front
Coronavirus R: Is this the crucial number?
This is a good explainer of what R means when we talk about transmission/infection rates. In the UK, R is about 0.7 which is under 1 (good!), but doesn’t give you a lot of room for movement. Do we ease lockdown now and risk it going back over 1 again? That’s exactly the problem scientists and the government are grappling with.
www.bbc.co.uk  •  Share
ONS released low-level (MSOA) figures for coronavirus deaths in England and Wales, and maps to go with them. These are at such low levels in terms of geography that it’s actually quite sobering to see. It also shows that in areas of deprivation, covid-19 deaths are disproportionally higher.
www.ons.gov.uk  •  Share
Coronavirus: Which shops have treated workers well?
Coronavirus: Which shops have treated workers well?
Kind of data, kind of not data. Lewis Cotter has put together a one-stop-shop page which shows you how well (or badly!) shop chains have treated workers. It feels a bit too subjective to me since many companies have taken different actions and it’s hard to quantify, but probably useful if you’re being ethically-minded during lockdown.
www.lewiscotter.com  •  Share
What is the official death toll and will care home deaths exceed hospital deaths? I didn’t know this: “The number of Covid-19 deaths in care homes in Scotland has exceeded hospital deaths for the first time”.
www.theguardian.com  •  Share
Over the pond
Brands like Neiman Marcus and J.C. Penney may crumble under coronavirus closures
I really loved the creative way that WaPo approached this - showing a four-level mall where store footprint = revenue. It shows which retailers face problems in the current climate. Looks like it may have been inspired by this Journal article about the death of the American mall.
www.washingtonpost.com  •  Share
“Another 3.8 million people filed claims for unemployment last week, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to weigh on the U.S. job market. That’s roughly one out of five people who had a job in February.”
www.npr.org  •  Share
Dixie in the crosshairs - The South is likely to have America’s highest death rate from covid-19
Dixie in the crosshairs - The South is likely to have America’s highest death rate from covid-19
“If covid-19 does infect most Americans, the highest death rates will probably not be in coastal cities… but rather in poor, rural parts of the South and Appalachia with high rates of heart disease and diabetes.”
www.economist.com  •  Share
Quartz looked at immigrant workers in the US and what jobs they tend to do, to see how the pandemic might affect them. Primarily it’s an issue of health coverage and unemployment protections: “A high proportion of the US’s farm laborers are seasonal workers coming to the country temporarily. About 42% of them do not have health insurance.”
qz.com  •  Share
States Made It Harder to Get Jobless Benefits. Now That’s Hard to Undo
States Made It Harder to Get Jobless Benefits. Now That’s Hard to Undo
Welfare systems that were designed to treat every case as potentially fraudulent are not fit for purpose when millions of newly unemployed people are genuinely entitled to benefits.
www.nytimes.com  •  Share
Elsewhere
The last places on earth without coronavirus
There are 30 countries and territories that haven’t reported a single case of coronavirus. Interesting but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt - “just because a nation has not reported an infection, it does not necessarily mean there have been no cases.”
graphics.reuters.com  •  Share
Interesting figures about France based on data from the French stats office (INSEE). If I am reading it right, people aged 85+ make up 3.4% of the population but 38% of the deaths. (I think this is deaths overall, so hard to say how much is attributed to covid-19?)
www.lemonde.fr  •  Share
Odds and ends
Identifying Generational Gaps in Music
I just wasted half an hour of my life listening to everything in this only to find out that I suck at identifying music. All Star by Smash Mouth looks like it might be the most easily identifiable piece of music across generations. HA!
pudding.cool  •  Share
Does what it says on the tin - a lot of scrolling, but a good way to visualise something which many ordinary people really struggle to get to grips with. A billion is a lot more than a million..
mkorostoff.github.io  •  Share
75 Jahre Kriegsende
75 Jahre Kriegsende
Not data but extremely cool digital presentation. A virtual exhibition, ‘After Berlin’, shows how Berlin landmarks looked at the end of the second world war compared to now. It’s really cool. The exhibition marks the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII.
75jahrekriegsende.berlin  •  Share
Again not data, but a Possibly Cool Thing that I wanted to share. Apparently a faithful flyover of a recreation of Tudor London before 1666. I’d prefer to be able to explore it for myself and not through an enforced perspective swinging in and out of doorways. ENJOY IT UNTIL YOU GET MOTION SICKNESS AND NEED TO LIE DOWN.
www.faena.com  •  Share
Outbreak
Outbreak
This is a really interesting playable simulation of an infectious outbreak. It’s not covid-19 specific but it does illustrate quite well how infections can spread very quickly based on different variables.
meltingasphalt.com  •  Share
Bad chart of the week
From the source: “It’s a useful way to look at data when you are trying to demonstrate change over time.” Is it?
No it isn't.
No it isn't.
That’s everything for this week. Apologies for going AWOL for a couple of weeks. :) If you enjoyed reading this, please do forward to people who you think will also enjoy it. You can also buy me a coffee, or become a Patron of Fair Warning if you really like reading these newsletters (most) weeks. Thanks for reading and supporting!
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Sophie Warnes

A weekly newsletter with anywhere between 10 and 20 links about data journalism, data visualisation, and storytelling, curated by a British data journalist and nerd. Expect politics, statistics, society and culture - all through the frame of data... With a dash of whimsy.

Read more about the author at www.sophiewarnes.com.

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