It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?
About the update rate: It's updated regularly. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, is 1m update real-time? Is 1s update realtime? Where do you draw the line? For most people, anything less than 12h, in the case of tracking confirmed cases, is perfectly fine described as "real-time"
About the data: Obviously it's showing confirmed cases and not actual health of people. The UI makes that pretty clear, it says "Confirmed cases" in big font. No one expects the latter...
No information is available real time. There will always be a lag even with stock trading. Determining what is acceptable for real time depends on the context. A few seconds would be unacceptable for stock information but would be more than enough for a 911 real time notification system to first responders. 12 hours for global viral outbreak stats seems acceptable for real time status.
CSSE is manually aggregating data from official sources. It's updated, at most, twice a day so there is hefty lag from when the official numbers are updated and CSSE updates their site. It's about the best source of statistics that laypeople will have but it's hardly worth calling it 'real time'.
If I "touch a.txt" then run "ls", and see "a.txt", I'd consider my filesystem realtime. There's no point in being pedantic about "but there's a 50ms delay when I hit enter after typing ls so it's not realtime!!!".
"Realtime virus outbreak" implies that the site is somehow automatically identifying where the virus is and updating it's stats, rather than waiting for a human to update it.
Since "implies that the site is somehow automatically identifying where the virus is" is obviously impossible with current tech & infrastructure, the next most "real-time" interpretation is that it has the most up-to-date data as it becomes available... which it basically does AFAIK, assuming it automatically pulls from its data sources, such as the WHO situation report feed.
It's not impossible, most countries have digitized medical records. It wouldn't be technically difficult to automatically send out a ping to a centralized location when a new patient is diagnosed with novel coronovirus. Politically, on the other hand, it's not going to happen.
I don't think that's the case, it is a map of data updated by an editor. The website in question doesn't seem to fetch data automatically as the sources are making it available.
I don't believe that the data on this website is gathered through automatic means.
Real-time is not all about latency, live TV or a Skype call also has a latency but it is real-time for all means and purposes since it is automatically gathered, transformed and transported without human labour and immediately.
I don't believe that the data on this website is gathered through automatic means.
Almost all of it is done by hand by the folks at the Johns Hopkins University's CSSE department. It gets updated around twice a day and they're constantly fiddling with the layout and whatnot.
In other words, it is a plot of data that is regularly updated.
No, it's updated quite irregularly. Given the time difference between the East Coast and China I'd expect that quite a bit of delay is to be expected between information being released and CSSE updating their site. They're also combining data from different sources and clearly are batching updates together.
This comment and the replies to it really give a glimpse into the psyche of the more pedantry-prone members of HN.
For me, if someone says X, and a literal interpretation of X would be impossible/ridiculous, I naturally assume the more generous interpretation Y. I would find it bizarre to believe that X was intended.
Some people however cannot escape the interpretation X, and find the statement bizarre fullstop.
> For me, if someone says X, and a literal interpretation of X would be impossible/ridiculous, I naturally assume the more generous interpretation Y. I would find it bizarre to believe that X was intended.
I naturally assume it either doesn't know what it is talking about, or is trying to be manipulate through intentional misuse of words.
Words have meaning. You don't get to arbitrarily decide to change that meaning. I'm not defending the extreme pedantry, but at some point word use is just flat wrong, and that is the case with the original post.
Although not on topic, I think you point highlights a rather unaddressed issue with data and systems relevance. As you imply, not only is it inherently not possible to track a whole population's "wellbeing", doing so in "real-time" is even more ludicrous. So many measures and metrics are really nothing more than utter fabrications that are totally incompatible in spite of being named similarly, and no, that hardly ever seems to dissuade anyone from hooking up to anything but the most obviously egregious offending systems and their garbage data/information.
Just a single aspect of this issue is, what does real-time mean for aggregate, global measures? Days? Hours? Is it somehow more useful to have 100% accuracy at either interval? And what are the criteria that even determine accuracy at all, let alone precision. This is all a kabuki dance with approaching no relevance, especially in the case of the pandemic when there is also approaching zero confidence in the Chinese numbers at all, and it does not matter how many fancy dashboards are put together by "hooking up to such a system", when the numbers could be 2x as high, 5x, 100x, or who knows because they very system of governance and ideology actively evades honesty and responsibility.
ALL of these numbers should be fundamentally caveated every single time any of them are provided with "that they are Chinese data and the Chinese lie about lying, while lying about the fact that they lied. At the very least currently, trusting any Chinese person is an act of insanity, regardless of whether any given individual Chinese person is honest 100% of the time. How much more do people have to be lied to, deceived, cheated, stolen from, plundered, spied on, and infected with communicable diseases that could crash all of civilization by killing millions before we realize there is a mentally ill manic insanity going around that starts with the insanity of not having a common framework for data and information collection, processing, and conveyance.
I would say flightradar24 is real-time plane tracking and wouldn't say that Reddit is a real-time news source. The difference would be that there's a system in place that consistently and automatically updates the information by gathering data from other real-time systems.
It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?