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.
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...