Sars Retrospective

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All this talk of swine flu has me looking over my old SARS blog. I was fascinated with the progress of the disease and crunched the global stats daily.

The blog is still sitting mothballed at its original location here: http://sarstracker.blogspot.com/.

 
The most interesting analysis which I produced, which I never saw reproduced elsewhere, is visual depictions of the variation in the age of victims by location of outbreak.

Sars by country

The graph above shows the deaths in Singapore, Hong Kong and Toronto with Singapore in the foreground. Age is on the left axis with the width of the bars is a function of the number of victims. The victims ages are lined up chronologically. Blue & pink represent male and female victims.

The image clearly shows that while Hong Kong suffered the most victims, the average age of victims was lowest in Singapore where a disproportionate number were hospital staff.

 
I also produced a nifty flash based illustration of the spread of SARS in Singapore. Click through to the original for the best picture and right click for magnification.

View the Original

The illustration is based on information from local newspapers and the government SARS database.