The gift of small edits and subtraction

While making the chart on fertility rates (link), I came across a problem that pops up quite often, and is  ignored by most software programs.

Here is an earlier version of the chart I later discarded:

Compare this to the version I published in the blog post:

Aside from adding the chart title, there is one major change. I removed the empty plots from the grid. This is a visualization trick that should be called adding by subtracting. The empty scaffolding on the first chart increases our cognitive load without yielding any benefit. The whitespace brings out the message that only countries in Asia and Africa have fertility rates above 5.0. 

This is a small edit. But small edits accumulate and deliver a big impact. Bear this in mind the next time you make a chart.

 

P.S.

(1) You'd have to use a lower-level coding language to execute this small edit. Most software programs are quite rigid when it comes to making small-multiples (facet) charts.

(2) If there is a next iteration, I'd reverse the Asia and Oceania rows.

 

Visualizing fertility rates around the globe

The following chart dropped on my Twitter feed.

It's an ambitious chart that tries to do a lot. The underlying data set contains fertility rate data from over 200 countries over 20 years.

The basic chart form is a column chart that is curled up into a ball. The column chart is given colors that map to continents. All countries are grouped into five continents. The column chart can only take a single data series, so the 2019 fertility rate is chosen.

Beyond this basic setup, the designer embellishes the chart with a trove of information. Here's a close up:

The first number is the 2019 fertility rate, which means all the data encoded into the columns are also printed on the chart itself. Then, the flag of each country forms the next ring. Then, the name of the country. Finally, in brackets, the percent change in fertility rate between 2000 and 2019.

That is not all. Some contextual information are injected in those arrows that connect the columns to the data labels. A green arrow indicates that the fertility rate is trending lower - which is the case in most countries around the world. Once in a while, a purple arrow pops up. In the above excerpt, Seychelles gets a purple arrow because this island nation has increased the fertility rate from 2000 to 2019.

Also hiding in the background are several dashed rings. I think only the one that partially overlaps with the column chart contains any information - the other rings are inserted for an artistic reason. To decipher this dashed ring, we must look at the inset in the top left corner. We learn that the value of 2.1 children per woman is known as the replacement fertility rate. So it's also possible to assess whether each country is above or below the replacement fertility rate threshold.

[I'm presuming that this replacement threshold is about the births necessary to avoid a population decline. If that's the case, then comparing each country's fertility rate to a global fertility rate threshold is too simplistic because fertility is only one of several key factors driving a country's population growth. A more sophisticated model should generate country-level thresholds.]

***

Data graphics serve many functions. This chart works well as an embellished data table. It does take some time to find a specific country because the columns have been sorted by decreasing 2019 fertility rate but once we locate the column, all the other data fields are clearly laid out.

As a generator of data insights, this chart is less effective. The main insight I obtained from it is a rough ranking of continents, with African countries predominantly having higher fertility rates, followed by Asia and Oceania, then Americas, and finally, Europe which has the lowest fertility rates. If this is the key message, a standard choropleth map brings it out more directly.

***

Here is a small-multiples rendering of the fertility dataset. I chose 1999 values instead of 2000 to make a complete two-decade view.

The columns represent a grouping of countries based on their 1999 fertility rates. The left column contains countries with the lowest number of births per woman, and the fertility rate increases left to right - both within an individual plot and in the grid.

If you're wondering, the hidden vertical axis sorts the countries by their 1999 rank. The lighter colors are 1999 values while the darker colors are 2019 values. For most countries the dots are shifting left over the 20 years. There are some exceptions. I have labeled several of these exceptions (e.g. Kazakhstan and Mongolia), and rendered them in italic.

 

 

 

Charts that ask questions about the German election

In the prior post about Canadian elections, I suggested that designers expand beyond plots of one variable at a time. Today, I look at a project by DataWrapper on the German elections which happened this week. Thanks to long-time blog supporter Antonio for submitting the chart.

The following is the centerpiece of Lisa's work:

CDU/CSU is Angela Merkel's party, represented by the black color. The chart answers one question only: did polls correctly predict election results?

The time period from 1994 to 2021 covers eight consecutive elections (counting the one this week). There are eight vertical blocks on the chart representing each administration. The right vertical edge of each block coincides with an election. The chart is best understood as the superposition of two time series.

You can trace the first time series by following a step function - let your eyes follow the flat lines between elections. This dataset shows the popular vote won by the party at each election, with the value updated after each election. The last vertical block represents an election that has not yet happened when this chart was created. As explained in the footnote, Lisa took the average poll result for the last month leading up to the 2021 election - in the context of this chart, she made the assumption that this cycle of polls will be 100% accurate.

The second time series corresponds to the ragged edges of the gray and black areas. If you ignore the colors, and the flat lines, you'll discover that the ragged edges form a contiguous data series. This line encodes the average popularity of the CDU/CSU party according to election polls.

Thus, the area between the step function and the ragged line measures the gap between polls and election day results. When the polls underestimate the actual outcome, the area is colored gray; when the polls are over-optimistic, the area is colored black. In the last completed election of 2017, Merkel's party underperformed relative to the polls. In fact, the polls in the entire period between the 2013 and 2017 uniformly painted a rosier picture for CDU/CSU than actually happened.

The last vertical block is interpreted a little differently. Since the reference level is the last month of polls (rather than the actual popular vote), the abundance of black indicates that Merkel's party has been suffering from declining poll numbers on the approach of this week's election.

***

The picture shown above seems to indicate that these polls are not particularly good. It appears they have limited ability to self-correct within each election cycle. Aside from the 1998-2002 period, the area colors seldom changed within each cycle. That means if the first polling average overestimated the party's popularity, then all subsequent polling averages were also optimistic. (The original post focused on a single pollster, which exacerbates this issue. Compare the following chart with the above, and you'll find even fewer color changes within cycle here:

Each pollster may be systematically biased but the poll aggregate is less so.)

 

Here's the chart for SDP, which is CDU/CSU's biggest opponent, and likely winner of this week's election:

Overall, this chart has similar features as the CDU/CSU chart. The most recent polls seem to favor the SPD - the pink area indicates that the older polls of this cycle underestimates the last month's poll result.

Both these parties are in long-term decline, with popularity dropping from the 40% range in the 1990s to the 20% range in the 2020s.

One smaller party that seems to have gained followers is the Green party:

The excess of dark green, however, does not augur well for this election.

 

 

 

 

 

Ridings, polls, elections, O Canada

Stephen Taylor reached out to me about his work to visualize Canadian elections data. I took a look. I appreciate the labor of love behind this project.

He led with a streamgraph, which presents a quick overview of relative party strengths over time.

I am no Canadian election expert, and I did a bare minimum of research in writing this blog. From this chart, I learn that:

• the Canadians have an irregular election schedule
• Canada has a two party plus breadcrumbs system
• The two dominant parties are Liberals and Conservatives. The Liberals currently hold just less than half of the seats. The Conservatives have more than half of the seats not held by Liberals
• The Conservative party (maybe) rebranded as "progressive conservative" for several decades. The Reform/Alliance party was (maybe) a splinter movement within the Conservatives as well.
• Since the "width" of the entire stream increased over time, I'm guessing the number of seats has expanded

That's quite a bit of information obtained at a glance. This shows the power of data visualization. Notice Stephen didn't even have to include a "how to read this" box.

The streamgraph form has its limitations.

The feature that makes it more attractive than an area chart is its middle anchoring, resulting in a form of symmetry. The same feature produces erroneous intuition - the red patch draws out a declining trend; the reader must fight the urge to interpret the lines and focus on the areas.

The breadcrumbs are well hidden. The legend below discloses that the Green Party holds 3 seats currently. The party has never held enough seats to appear on the streamgraph though.

The bars showing proportions in the legend is a very nice touch. (The numbers appear messed up - I have to ask Stephen whether the seats shown are current values, or some kind of historical average.) I am a big fan of informative legends.

***

The next featured chart is a dot plot of polling results since 2020.

One can see a three-tier system: the two main parties, then the NDP (yellow) is the clear majority of the minority, and finally you have a host of parties that don't poll over 10%.

It looks like the polls are favoring the Conservatives over the Liberals in this election but it may be an election-day toss-up.

The purple dots represent "PPC" which is a party not found elsewhere on the page.

This chart is clear as crystal because of the structure of the underlying data. It just amazes me that the polls are so highly correlated. For example, across all these polls, the NDP has never once polled better than either the Liberals or the Conservatives, and in addition, it has never polled worse than any of the small parties.

What I'd like to see is a chart that merges the two datasets, addressing the question of how well these polls predicted the actual election outcomes.

***

The project goes very deep as Stephen provides charts for individual "ridings" (perhaps similar to U.S. precincts).

Here we see population pyramids for Vancouver Center, versus British Columbia (Province), versus Canada.

This riding has a large surplus of younger people in their twenties and thirties. Be careful about the changing scales though. The relative difference in proportions are more drastic than visually displayed because the maximum values (5%) on the Province and Canada charts are half that on the Riding chart (10%). Imagine squashing the Province and Canada charts to half their widths.

Analyses of income and rent/own status are also provided.

This part of the dashboard exhibits a problem common in most dashboards - they present each dimension of the data separately and miss out on the more interesting stuff: the correlation between dimensions. Do people in their twenties and thirties favor specific parties? Do richer people vote for certain parties?

***

The riding-level maps are the least polished part of the site. This is where I'm looking for a "how to read it" box.

It took me a while to realize that the colors represent the parties. If I haven't come in from the front page, I'd have been totally lost.

Next, I got confused by the use of the word "poll". Clicking on any of the subdivisions bring up details of an actual race, with party colors, candidates and a donut chart showing proportions. The title gives a "poll id" and the name of the riding in parentheses. Since the poll id changes as I mouse over different subdivisions, I'm wondering whether a "poll" is the term for a subdivision of a riding. A quick wiki search indicates otherwise.

My best guess is the subdivisions are indicated by the numbers.

Back to the donut charts, I prefer a different sorting of the candidates. For this chart, the two most logical orderings are (a) order by overall popularity of the parties, fixed for all ridings and (b) order by popularity of the candidate, variable for each riding.

The map shown above gives the winner in each subdivision. This type of visualization dumps a lot of information. Stephen tackles this issue by offering a small multiples view of each party. Here is the Liberals in Vancouver.

Again, we encounter ambiguity about the color scheme. Liberals have been associated with a red color but we are faced with abundant yellow. After clicking on the other parties, you get the idea that he has switched to a divergent continuous color scale (red - yellow - green). Is red or green the higher value? (The answer is red.)

I'd suggest using a gray scale for these charts. The hardest decision is going to be the encoding between values and shading. Should each gray scale be different for each riding and each party?

If I were to take a guess, Stephen must have spent weeks if not months creating these maps (depending on whether he's full-time or part-time). What he has published here is a great start. Fine-tuning the issues I've mentioned may take more weeks or months more.

****

Stephen is brave and smart to send this project for review. For one thing, he's got some free consulting. More importantly, we should always send work around for feedback; other readers can tell us where our blind spots are.

To read more, start with this post by Stephen in which he introduces his project.

A little stitch here, a great graphic is knitted

The Wall Street Journal used the following graphic to compare hurricanes Ida and Katrina (link to paywalled article).

This graphic illustrates the power of visual communications. Readers can learn a lot from it.

The paths of the storms can be compared. The geographical locations of the landfalls are shown. The strengthening of wind speeds as the hurricanes moved toward Louisiana is also displayed. Ida is clearly a lesser storm than Katrina: its wind speed never reached Category 5, and is generally lower at comparable time points.

The greatest feature of the WSJ graphic is how the designer stitches the two plots into one graphic. The anchors are two time points: when each storm attained enough wind speed to be classified as a hurricane (indicated by open dots), and when each storm made landfall in Louisiana. It is this little-noticed feature that makes it so easy to place each plot in context of the other.

Bravo!

Visually displaying multipliers

As I'm preparing a blog about another real-world study of Covid-19 vaccines, I came across the following chart (the chart title is mine).

As background, this is the trend in Covid-19 cases in the U.K. in the last couple of months, courtesy of OurWorldinData.org.

The React-1 Study sends swab kits to randomly selected people in England in order to assess the prevalence of Covid-19. Every month, there is a new round of returned swabs that are tested for Covid-19. This measurement method captures asymptomatic cases although it probably missed severe and hospitalized cases. Despite having some shortcomings, this is a far better way to measure cases than the hotch-potch assembling of variable-quality data submitted by different jurisdictions that has become the dominant source of our data.

Rounds 12 and 13 captured an inflection point in the pandemic in England. The period marked the beginning of the end of the belief that widespread vaccination will end the pandemic.

The chart I excerpted up top broke the data down by age groups. The column heights represent the estimated prevalence of Covid-19 during each round - also, described precisely in the paper as "swab positivity." Based on the study's design, one may generalize the prevalence to the population at large. About 1.5% of those aged 13-24 in England are estimated to have Covid-19 around the time of Round 13 (roughly early July).

The researchers came to the following conclusion:

We show that the third wave of infections in England was being driven primarily by the Delta variant in younger, unvaccinated people. This focus of infection offers considerable scope for interventions to reduce transmission among younger people, with knock-on benefits across the entire population... In our data, the highest prevalence of infection was among 12 to 24 year olds, raising the prospect that vaccinating more of this group by extending the UK programme to those aged 12 to 17 years could substantially reduce transmission potential in the autumn when levels of social mixing increase

***

Raise your hand if the graphics software you prefer dictates at least one default behavior you can't stand. I'm sure most hands are up in the air. No matter how much you love the software, there is always something the developer likes that you don't.

The first thing I did with today's chart is to get rid of all such default details.

For me, the bottom chart is cleaner and more inviting.

***

The researchers wanted readers to think in terms of Round 3 numbers as multiples of Round 2 numbers. In the text, they use statements such as:

weighted prevalence in round 13 was nine-fold higher in 13-17 year olds at 1.56% (1.25%, 1.95%) compared with 0.16% (0.08%, 0.31%) in round 12

It's not easy to perceive a nine-fold jump from the paired column chart, even though this chart form is better than several others. I added some subtle divisions inside each orange column in order to facilitate this task:

I have recommended this before. I'm co-opting pictograms in constructing the column chart.

An alternative is to plot everything on an index scale although one would have to drop the prevalence numbers.

***

The chart requires an additional piece of context to interpret properly. I added each age group's share of the population below the chart - just to illustrate this point, not to recommend it as a best practice.

The researchers concluded that their data supported vaccinating 13-17 year olds because that group experienced the highest multiplier from Round 12 to Round 13. Notice that the 13-17 year old age group represents only 6 percent of England's population, and is the least populous age group shown on the chart.

The neighboring 18-24 age group experienced a 4.5 times jump in prevalence in Round 13 so this age group is doing much better than 13-17 year olds, right? Not really.

While the same infection rate was found in both age groups during this period, the slightly older age group accounted for 50% more cases -- and that's due to the larger share of population.

A similar calculation shows that while the infection rate of people under 24 is about 3 times higher than that of those 25 and over, both age groups suffered over 175,000 infections during the Round 3 time period (the difference between groups was < 4,000).  So I don't agree that focusing on 13-17 year olds gives England the biggest bang for the buck: while they are the most likely to get infected, their cases account for only 14% of all infections. Almost half of the infections are in people 25 and over.

 

Working hard at clarity

As I am preparing another blog post about the pandemic, I came across the following data graphic, recently produced by the CDC for a vaccine advisory board meeting:

This is not an example of effective visual communications.

***

For one thing, readers are directed to scour the footnotes to figure out what's going on. If we ignore those for the moment, we see clusters of bubbles that have remained pretty stable from December 2020 to August 2021. The data concern some measure of Americans' intent to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That much we know.

There may have been a bit of an upward trend between January and May, although if you were shown the clusters for December, February and April, you'd think the trend's been pretty flat. 

***

But those colors? What could they represent? You'd surely have to fish this one out of the footnotes. Specifically, this obtuse sentence: "Surveys with multiple time points are shown with the same color bubble for each time point." I had to read it several times. I think it simply means "Color represents the pollster." 

Then it adds: "Surveys with only one time point are shown in gray." which simply means "All pollsters who have only one entry in the dataset are grouped together and shown in gray."

Another problem with this chart is over-plotting. Look at the July cluster. It's impossible to tell how many polls were conducted in July because the circles pile on top of one another. 

***

The appearance of the flat trend is a result of two unfortunate decisions made by the designer. If I retained the chart form, I'd have produced something that looks like this:

The first design choice is to expand the vertical axis to range from 0% to 100%. This effectively squeezes all the bubbles into a small range.

The second design choice is to enlarge the bubbles causing copious amount of overlapping. 

In particular, this decision blows up the Pew poll (big pink bubble) that contained 10 times the sample size of most of the other polls. The Pew outcome actually came in at 70% but the top of the pink bubble extends to over 80%. Because of this, the outlier poll of December 2020 - which surprisingly printed the highest number of all polls in the entire time window - no longer looks special. 

***

Now, let's see what else we can do to enhance this chart. 

I don't like how bubble size is used to encode the sample size. It creates a weird sensation for anyone who's familiar with sampling errors, and confidence regions. The Pew poll with 10 times the sample size is the most reliable poll of them all. Reliability means the error bars around the Pew poll outcome is the smallest of them all. I tend to think of the area around a point estimate as showing the sampling error so the Pew poll would be a dot, showing the high precision of that estimate. 

But that won't work because larger bubbles catch more of the reader's attention. So, in the following version, all dots have the same size. I encode reliability in the opacity of the color. The darker dots are polls that are more reliable, that have larger sample sizes.

Two of the pollsters have more frequent polling than others. In this next version, I highlighted those two, which reveals the trend better.

 

 

 

Check your presumptions while you're reading this chart about Israel's vaccination campaign

On July 30, Israel began administering third doses of mRNA vaccines to targeted groups of people. This decision was controversial since there is no science to support it. The policymakers do have educated guesses by experts based on best-available information. By science, I mean actual evidence. Since no one has previously been given three shots, there can be no data on which anyone can root such a decision. Nevertheless, the pandemic does not always give us time to collect relevant data, and so speculative analysis has found its calling.

Dvir Aran, at Technion, has been diligently tracking the situation in Israel on his Twitter. Ten days after July 30, he posted the following chart, which immediately led many commentators to bounce out of their seats crowning the third shot as a magic bullet. Notably, Dvir himself did not endorse such a claim. (See here to learn how other hasty conclusions by experts have fared.)

When you look at Dvir's chart, what do we see?

Possibly one of the following two things, depending on what concern you have in your head.

1) The red line sits far above the other two lines, showing that unvaccinated people are much more likely to get infected.

2) The blue line diverges from the green line almost immediately after the 3rd shots started getting into arms, showing that the 3rd shot is super effective.

If you take another moment to look, you might start asking questions, as many in Twitter world did. Dvir was startlingly efficient at answering these queries.

A) Does the green line represent people with 2 or 3 doses, or is it strictly 2 doses? Aron asked this question and got the answer (the former):

It's time to check our presumptions. When you read that chart, did you presume it's exactly 2 doses or did you presume it's 2 or 3 doses? Or did you immediately spot the ambiguity? As I said in this article, graphs attain efficiency at communication because the designer leverages unspoken rules - the chart conveys certain information without explicitly placing it on the chart. But this can backfire. In this case, I presumed the three lines to display three non-overlapping groups of people, and thus the green line indicates those with 2 doses but not 3. That presumption led me to misinterpret what's on the chart.

B) What is the denominator of the case rates? Is it literal - by that I mean, all unvaccinated people for the red line, and all people with 3 doses for the blue line? Or is the denominator the population of Israel, the same number for all three lines? Lukas asked this question, and got the answer (the former).

C) Since third shots are recommended for 60 year olds and over who were vaccinated at least 5 months ago, and most unvaccinated Israelis are below 60, this answer opens the possibility that the lines compare apples and oranges. Joe. S. asked about this, and received an answer (all lines display only 60 year olds and over.)

Jason P. asked, and learned that the 5-month-out criterion is immaterial since 90% of the vaccinated have already reached that time point.

D) We have even more presumptions. Like me, did you presume that the red line represents the "unvaccinated," meaning people who have not had any vaccine shots? If so, we may both be wrong about this. It has become the norm by vaccine researchers to lump "partially vaccinated" people with "unvaccinated", and call this combined group "unvaccinated". Here is an excerpt from a recent report from Public Health Ontario (link to PDF), which clearly states this unintuitive counting rule:

Notice that in this definition, someone who got infected within 14 days of the first shot is classified as an "unvaccinated" case and not a "partially vaccinated case".

In the following tweet, Dvir gave a hint of what he plotted:

In a previous analysis, he averaged the rates of people with 0 doses and 1 dose, which is equivalent to combining them and calling them unvaccinated. It's unclear to me what he did to the 1-dose subgroup in our featured chart - did it just vanish from the chart? (How people and cases are classified into these groups is a major factor in all vaccine effectiveness calculations - a topic I covered here. Unfortunately, most published reports do a poor job explaining what the analysts did).

E) Did you presume that all three lines are equally important? That's far from true. Since Israel is the world champion in vaccination, the bulk of the 60+ population form the green line. I asked Dvir and he responded that only 7.5%, or roughly 100K are unvaccinated.

That means 1.2 million people are part of the green line, 12 times higher. There are roughly 50 cases per day among unvaccinated, and 370 daily cases among those with 2 or 3 doses. In other words, vaccinated people account for almost 90% of all cases.

Yes, this is inevitable when over 90% of the age group have been vaccinated (but it is predictable on the first day someone blasted everywhere that real-world VE is proved by the fact that almost all new cases were in the unvaccinated.)

If your job is to minimize infections, you should be spending most of your time thinking about the 370 cases among vaccinated than the 50 cases among unvaccinated. If you halve the case rate, that would be a difference of 185 cases vs 25. In Israel, the vaccination campaign has already succeeded; it's time to look forward, which is exactly why they are re-focusing on the already vaccinated.

***

If what you worry about most is the effectiveness of the original two-dose regimen, Dvir's chart raises a puzzle. Ignore the blue line, and remember that the green line already includes everybody represented by the blue line.

In the following chart, I removed the blue line, and added reference lines in dashed purple that correspond to 25%, 50% and 75% vaccine effectiveness. The data plotted on this chart are unadjusted case rates. A 75% effective vaccine cuts case rate by three quarters.

This chart shows the 2-dose mRNA vaccine was nowhere near 90% effective. (As regular readers know, I don't endorse this simplistic calculation and have outlined the problems here, but this style of calculation keeps getting published and passed around. Those who use it to claim real-world studies confirm prior clinical trial outcomes can either (a) insist on using it and retract their earlier conclusions, or (b) admit that such a calculation was, and is, a bad take.)

Also observe how the vaccinated (green) line is moving away from the unvaccinated (red) line. The vaccine apparently is becoming more effective, which runs counter to the trend used by the Israeli government to justify third doses. This improvement also precedes the start of the third-shot campaign. When the analytical method is bad, it generates all sorts of spurious findings.

***

As Dvir said, it is premature to comment on the third doses based on 10 days of data. For one thing, the vaccine developers insist that their vaccines must be given 14 days to work. In a typical calculation, all of the cases in the blue line fall outside the case-counting window. The effective number of cases that would be attributed to the 3-dose group right now is zero, and the vaccine effectiveness using the standard methodology is 100%, even better than shown in the chart.

There is an alternative interpretation of this graph. Statisticians call this the selection effect. On July 30, the blue line split out of the green: some people were selected to receive the 3rd dose - this includes an official selection (the government makes certain subgroups eligible) as well as a self-selection (within the eligible subgroup, certain people decide to get the 3rd shot earlier.) If those who are less exposed to the virus, or more risk averse, get the shots first, then all that is happening may be that we have split off a high VE subgroup from the green line. Even if the third shot were useless, the selection effect itself could explain the gap.

Statistics is about grays. It's not either-or. It's usually some of each. If you feel like Groundhog Day, you're getting the picture. When they rolled out two doses, we lived through an optimistic period in which most experts rejoiced about 90-100% real-world effectiveness, and then as more people get vaccinated, the effect washed away. The selection effect gradually disappears when vaccination becomes widespread. Are we starting a new cycle of hope and despair? We'll find out soon enough.

Hanging things on your charts

The Financial Times published the following chart that shows the rollout of vaccines in the U.K.

(I can't find the online link to the article. The article is titled "AstraZeneca and Oxford face setbacks and success as battle enters next phase", May 29/30 2021.)

This chart form is known as a "streamgraph", and it is a stacked area chart in disguise. 

The same trick can be applied to a column chart. See the "hanging" column chart below:

The two charts show exactly the same data. The left one roots the columns at the bottom. The right one aligns the middle of the columns. 

I have rarely found these hanging charts useful. The realignment makes it harder to compare the sizes of the different column segments. On the normal stacked column chart, the yellow segments are the easiest to compare because they share the same base level. Even this is taken away from the reader on the right side.

Note also that the hanging version does not admit a vertical axis. 

The same comments apply to the streamgraph.

***

Nevertheless, I was surprised that the FT chart shown above actually works. The main message I learned was that initially U.K. primarily rolled out AstraZeneca and, to a lesser extent, Pfizer, shots while later, they introduced other vaccines, including Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, CureVac, Moderna, and "Other". 

I can also see that the supply of AstraZeneca has not changed much through the entire time window. Pfizer has grown to roughly the same scale as AstraZeneca. Moderna remains a small fraction of total shots. 

I can even roughly see that the total number of vaccinations has grown about six times from start to finish. 

That's quite a lot for one chart, so job well done!

There is one problem with the FT chart. It should have labelled end of May as "today". Half the chart is history, and the other half is the future.

***

For those following Covid-19 news, the FT chart is informative in a different way.

There is a misleading statement going around blaming the U.K.'s recent surge in cases on the Astrazeneca vaccine, claiming that the U.K. mostly uses AZ. This chart shows that from the start, about a third of the shots administered in the U.K. are Pfizer, and Pfizer's share has been growing over time. 

U.K. compared to some countries mostly using mRNA vaccines

U.K. is almost back to the winter peak. That's because the U.K. is serious about counting cases. Look at the state of testing in these countries:

What's clear about the U.S. case count is that it is kept low by cutting the number of tests by two-thirds, thus, our data now is once again severely biased towards severe cases. 

We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The drop in testing may directly lead to a proportional drop in reported cases, thus removing 500 (asymptomatic, or mild) cases per million from the case count. The case count goes below 250 per million so the additional 200 or so reduction is due to other reasons such as vaccinations.

Did prices go up or down? Depends on how one looks at the data

The U.S. media have been flooded with reports of runaway inflation recently, and it's refreshing to see a nice article in the Wall Street Journal that takes a second look at the data. Because as my readers know, raw data can be incredibly deceptive.

Inflation typically describes the change in price level relative to the prior year. The month-on-month change in price levels is a simple seasonal adjustment used to remove the effect of seasonality that masks the true change in price levels. (See this explainer of seasonal adjustment.)

As the pandemic enters the second year, this methodology is comparing 2021 price levels to pandemic-impacted price levels of 2020. This produces a very confusing picture. As the WSJ article explains, prices can be lower than they were in 2019 (pre-pandemic) and yet substantially higher than they were in 2020 (during the pandemic). This happens in industry sectors that were heavily affected by the economic shutdown, e.g. hotels, travel, entertainment.

Here is how they visualized this phenomenon. Amusingly, some algorithm estimated that it should take 5 minutes to read the entire article. It may take that much time to understand properly what this chart is showing.

Let me save you some time.

The chart shows monthly inflation rates of hotel price levels.

The pink horizontal stripes represent the official inflation numbers, which compare each month's hotel prices to those of a year prior. The most recent value for May of 2021 says hotel prices rose by 9% compared to May of 2020.

The blue horizontal stripes show an alternative calculation which compares each month's hotel prices to those of two years prior. Think of 2018-9 as "normal" years, pre-pandemic. Using this measure, we find that hotel prices for May of 2021 are about 4% lower than for May of 2019.

(This situation affects all of our economic statistics. We may see an expansion in employment levels from a year ago which still leaves us behind where we were before the pandemic.)

What confused me on the WSJ chart are the blocks of color. In a previous chart, the readers learn that solid colors mean inflation rose while diagonal lines mean inflation decreased. It turns out that these are month-over-month changes in inflation rates (notice that one end of the column for the previous month touches one end of the column of the next month).

The color patterns become the most dominant feature of this chart, and yet the month-over-month change in inflation rates isn't the crux of the story. The real star of the story should be the difference in inflation rates - for any given month - between two reference years.

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In the following chart, I focus attention on the within-month, between-reference-years comparisons.

Because hotel prices dropped drastically during the pandemic, and have recovered quite well in recent months as the U.S. reopens the economy, the inflation rate of hotel prices is almost 10%. Nevertheless, the current price level is still 7% below the pre-pandemic level.