Unfortunately, COVID-19 has affected so many people in so many places that my spreadsheet has gotten too big to work with. Going from the raw data provided by the Corona Data Scraper citizen science project to my graphs now literally takes about 4 hours of constant attention to Excel. I’ll have to rethink my approach.

Most likely I’ll do the preprocessing in Python, a simple but powerful programming language used by scientists all over the Universe. I’ll try to provide step-by-step instructions on how to how to run Python, and to document my programs extensively, so you can try them yourself. Even though Python can make graphs, I plan to continue making the graphs in Excel, because it’s a simple tool that so many of you already know how to use.

It might be a few days until my next COVID-19 update. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting other things on my usual Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, including something coming later today.