Daily new cases of COVID-19 in Canada

About this chart

This chart shows daily new cases of COVID-19, per million population, across Canada and it's provinces. By normalizing the number of cases per capita, it allows direct comparisons between provinces and/or the nation as a whole.

Keep in mind that these numbers don't tell the whole story. The protocols around testing vary by province, so these rates only allow a rough comparison between regions.

How to use this chart

Click on a region in the legend below the chart to enable/disable it. This allows you to compare rates between various provinces, territories, or the country as a whole. Hover your mouse over an individual datapoint to see it's absolute number of cases.

Data sources

The COVID-19 new cases data comes from the CBC. They operate a public API that is updated regularily.

The population data, used for calculating the per capita rates, comes from Statistics Canada.

Normalization of data

Apart from calculating the per capita rates, a small amount of other normalization has been performed.

Specifically, some provinces do not release new case numbers every day. In these cases, we see zero cases reported until the next reported day. That next reported day is artificially inflated, because it also represents test results from the previous unreported days. This causes misleading, extreme peaks and valleys in the chart. To address this problem, the unreported days are averaged with the next reported day.

For example, if there were two consecutive unreported days, then the subsequent day reported 300 new cases, all three days would be normalized to 100 each.

I feel this makes the chart more legible and also closer to reality. After all, there weren't really zero new cases of COVID-19 on those days. Currently this normalization is only applied to provinces with significant numbers of COVID-19 cases and recurring unreported days (Alberta, BC, Ontario).

Source code

You can view the source code for this project on GitHub. It is MIT licensed, please feel free to use it as you see fit.

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