A Visual Story of the COVID-19 Outbreak and How Misinformation Spreads

• Activity Number: 353 - Visual Stories That Count!
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 : 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Zoe Liu*
• Companies: Boston Scientific
• Keywords: 2019-nCoV; Coronavirus; data visualization; Python; Plotly; COVID19

Abstract

The first case the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province. By the mid-April (as of April 15), more than 2 million confirmed cases and 134 thousand deaths were reported across the world. As the outbreak evolves, various misinformation related to COVID-19, including origin and cures of the virus, goes viral online. This project aims to tell a visual story of how misinformation spreads with the outbreak of the virus by analyzing search data from Google Trends. Python is used to scrape and process data from online sources, and Plotly is used to create the visual story.