The Spread of Swine Flu: Blame it on Louisiana

Nate Silver has a map based on data from Google Flu Trends that shows the timeline of the spread of swine flu around the US:



Google Flu Trends works by applying the Google Panopticon to searches that correlate with CDC data on actual flu cases, and has the benefit of being immediately responsive to trends in outbreaks of influenza (CDC data tends to lag by a week or two).

Says Silver:

This map is fascinating on a number of levels. Although the initial outbreak of H1N1 back in April was centered on Texas, California, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, the place where the flu first hit critical mass several months later was in Louisiana. It then slowly radiated its way outward to most of the neighboring states -- Maine finally hit the 5,000-point threshold just last week. There also appear to be other points from which the flu spread -- a less prominent 'epicenter', for instance, centered in Minnesota and the Dakotas. And somehow, there came to be quite a lot of flu at various points in both Alaska and Hawaii -- Hawaii's peak actually came way back in June and July, well before the one in the Deep South.

Here's something I don't begin to understand: everyone kept saying there'd be a second wave of swine flu in the fall, because the slu likes colder temperatures. Sure enough that second wave came to pass - but it looks like it actually erupted in one of the warmest regions of the country at the height of summer. That makes the opposite of sense to me.

Anyhoo, here's some good news, according to Nate: "the flu is pretty much on the decline in all states except Northern New England." Though if you're looking for a reason to feel glum, you should be informed that more people have died in the US from swine flu than died in the attacks of September 11, and most of them were fairly young.

Meanwhile, I see that Google is going global (or at least semi-global) with their flu map:



Bad times for cold places.

Swine Flu: It Still Exists!

Remember how last week we were all going to die because of swine flu? And but now it looks like it just gives you a case of the sniffles? The media does seem to have a difficult time calibrating its coverage of these sorts of issues, doesn't it? Well, fortunately there are people still following the spread of the flu who actually know what they're talking about - people like Dr. Henry Niman, who made this google map of the flu and who has now set up shop with a new and fancier map.



It has numbers of suspected, confirmed and fatal cases for every country, and the data seems to be a bit ahead of other sources. E.g., who knew New Zealand had 174 cases? You can zoom in to see the spread of the virus within countries, too, like yea:



There are other maps as well, like this one of the spread of swine flu in the US by county. Blue counties have had 1-5 cases; greens have had 6-15; yellows have had 16-40; and reds have had more than 40:



Hmm. It seems to be much more widespread in the US now than it is in Mexico. Maybe we ought to close the border and keep the dirty Americans from infecting their neighbors to the south.

More Swine Flu Maps

Search Engine Land has links to some more maps of the porcine influenza. You know how google has a flu map for the US based on web search activity? Well, they've added an experimental flu map for Mexico, based on the same principles.



A few bits seem to be missing in this map of Mexico, but you can make out some trends: Oaxaca, Morelos, the Distrito Federal, and Quintana Roo (the best-named Mexican state) are showing the most "flu activity," as per Google's algorithms. One wonders, though, if their method holds up when there's so much media attention on the flu: couldn't all the news stories influence rates of Google searches?

Meanwhile, Tech Crunch looks at searches for "swine flu" across the 50 states. It's not as precise as Google Flu. As Tech Crunch notes, "this method is less likely to be predictive of the actual spread of the disease because it just measures raw searches." So think if it as one interesting data point, and nothing to hang your epidemiological hat on; and what that one data point shows is that the top ten states for swine flu searches are: Texas, Indiana, New York, Vermont, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and California. Again, this goes into the "for what it's worth category;" but it's interesting that several of those states have already had reported or suspected cases. That's probably just a reflection of media attention on reported cases, but if, say, Vermont and New Mexico pop up next in CDC reports, this map will have been prescient.

HealthMap is tracking swine flu by posting news reports and even some anecdotal reports from around the world.



The redder the marker, the more serious the news: "Swine Flu: Zambia Takes Steps" is a light yellow, "Fort Worth Schools Close for Swine Flu" is a rather more ominous crimson. (HealthMap also follows news of outbreaks of all sorts.)

Another map shows reported cases as well as the travel paths of infected individuals, according to news reports. And this heat map, at UMapper, gives a good picture of areas where the virus is currently spreading, with higher concentrations in white, shading towards purple at the peripheries.



Of course, if you like your swine flu maps to have the imprimatur of big media officialdom, you can check out the New York Times' characteristically high-quality maps of the outbreak in both the States and throughout the world.



And the BBC's map has a slider that lets you see the spread of the disease in pseudo-animation. Meanwhile, remember that google map of swine flu I posted a couple of days ago? Turns out it was put together by Dr. Henry Niman, an expert on viruses at the University of Pittsburgh. So that's good! Niman talks about his map in a video interview here.

Well, I guess I've gone and contributed, in my tiny way, to the media frenzy over swine flu. But I couldn't help it - this thing is just so eminently mappable.

Swine Flu: The Inevitable Google Map

It was only a matter of time before this showed up.



A Google map of the spread of the global health scare du jour. Pink markers are suspected cases; purple markers are confirmed or probable; deaths have no dot in the middle of the marker; yellow markers are negative cases. Click on markers for copious details on individual cases.

That someone would make such a map may have been inevitable, but nonetheless: note how cool it is. The map format, combined with (theoretically) near-time updates on reported cases and free 'n easy public access make this an ideal medium for monitoring the spread of an epidemic like swine flu.

Google Flu

No, it's not a mad scheme to embed the blueprint of Google's corporate ambitions in the genome of every living human (though don't think they haven't thought of it). It is, rather, an effort to use Google's alarmingly Everestian stockpile of data to track the spread of the flu bug.




Says Google:

We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.

So by using the use of search terms as a proxy for people's deepest wishes and concerns, and by extension as a proxy for their physical state, Google is providing a public service - letting us know where and when the flu is spreading. Faster than the Centers for Disease Control itself. Nothing nefarious about that.

Right?