Bloomberg tracker flags for increases?

[amyberrington]

Also can we create an alert system for increases a certain % above background (eg 5-yr average for that week). We could miss something if we are checking all the figures manually (as there are about 500 combinations of cause and state). Perhaps a summary table of cause by state with cumulative deaths (jan to current week) for each year, % change this year vs historical years could be the basis for the alerts - highlighting in red if it's greater than x% increase. This begins to get closer to my bloomberg tracker idea. @jonasalmeida

[jonasalmeida]

This is a great idea - I'm thinking this would be a new application, maybe overlayed in a map so you can see multiple warnings both as a list and overlayed on the geographic location. Is this a good direction to go, Amy?

[amyberrington]

A table might be an easier start to generate the results that we could then apply to a map. The plan is that anything we develop here can also be used for the cancer incidence tracker that we've been discussing for a while. The data will only be updated annually for that, but still it would be very helpful to see the whole landscape and picking up changes automatically.

[danielruss]

Thank you @amyberrington for reminding us that we can look for inspiration in other fields. The stock market is an excellent example of people trying to process financial data as fast as possible to earn a buck. We can use the same techniques to provide insight into epi-data to save lives.