Add toggle between "new" and "cumulative" for official report indicators.

[adamperer]

@RoniRos "We should add a toggle between “new” and “cumulative”, which applies to {Cases, Deaths} X {Counts, Counts per 100,000 people}. "

Related: I wonder if the choice between “Counts” and “Counts per 100,000 people” should also be implemented as a toggle switch, rather than by replicating items in the pulldown menu. This is especially because to Cases and Deaths we will soon add Tests, and hopefully also Hospitalizations and ICUs. All of these categories should be available in “Counts/Counts per 100,000 people” and also in “New/Cumulative”.

@krivard: are cumulative indicators ready?

[krivard]

Yep! Here's the list we have available:

select distinct `signal` from covidcast where source="jhu-csse";
+--------------------------------+
| signal                         |
+--------------------------------+
| confirmed_7dav_cumulative_num  |
| confirmed_7dav_cumulative_prop |
| confirmed_7dav_incidence_num   |
| confirmed_7dav_incidence_prop  |
| confirmed_cumulative_num       |
| confirmed_cumulative_prop      |
| confirmed_incidence_num        |
| confirmed_incidence_prop       |
| deaths_7dav_cumulative_num     |
| deaths_7dav_cumulative_prop    |
| deaths_7dav_incidence_num      |
| deaths_7dav_incidence_prop     |
| deaths_cumulative_num          |
| deaths_cumulative_prop         |
| deaths_incidence_num           |
| deaths_incidence_prop          |
+--------------------------------+

[sgratzl]

see also #357

[adamperer]

@krivard kindly reminded us we promised we would have these revised toggles for the next release. Thus, we need to finally converge on a design.

As discussed in the Team Leads meeting today, I think it may make sense to make Counts vs Ratio a separate toggle (we initially resisted this). As a bonus, this will make it more consistent with the small multiples view (where we hide Cases but not Cases per 100K because the signals look identical).

Opening up feedback for how these toggles should be labeled. Please advise @RoniRos and @ryantibs about the labels in the mock-up below.

After we decide, I would want to verify the language we use is interpretable to public health officials... but for now I'm assuming more advanced language that we original considering for the general public

[ryantibs]

@adamperer Visually, I like the look of it! One note: unless I'm mistaken, and we'll have to ask @krivard, but I didn't think the API would be providing both 7-day trend and 14-day trend (if so, that would be amazing ... I would definitely support having both, as I said at one point in an earlier meeting, but Katie reminded me that this would require an API change/addition).

As for the labels, I'll let @RoniRos weigh in on that, first.

[krivard]

From this afternoon's viz meeting:

Adding toggles to the map to cover all possible cases/deaths signal variations requires 4 toggles: incidence/cumulative, count/ratio, raw/smoothed, and value/direction. This takes up a significant amount of space, and best practices discourages having controls disappear, so they would need to be visible (if disabled) for all indicators.

Proposal:

• Keep incidence/cumulative; they show different curves within a region
• Keep count/ratio; they show different relationships between regions
• Discard raw/smoothed; we don’t currently show both in the map, and someone who wants the raw signal can go to the API
• Discard value/direction; direction is (1) currently unavailable, (2) ill-defined mathematically (currently depends on a signal having data before 22 april, which not all signals do), and (3) murky from a usability standpoint (is a linear regression the best way to address the problem a viewer wants to solve with a “trend” view? probably not). Someone who wants the direction signal can go to the API.

[RoniRos]

I have unsure about giving up the value/direction toggle. Discussed it with Ryan and Jodi. Jodi may bring this up again to see if three toggles can be accommodated.

[sgratzl]

latest dev:

re removing of direction (7 day trend): is this a short term thing that it is hidden or a long term one? in case of a long term one, we can simplify the code a lot

[RoniRos]

re removing of direction (7 day trend): is this a short term thing that it is hidden or a long term one? in case of a long term one, we can simplify the code a lot

The latest decision (discussed yesterday on the viz channel) is to NOT remove Trend, but rather to retain it. This was part of the decision to allow (some of the toggles) to be present only for the small number of signals for which they are relevant (Cases and Deaths, and later Tests)

[capnrefsmmat]

Yes, though Ryan, James, Katie and I discussed yesterday and agreed to temporarily remove the Trend button because it will not be available for several more weeks, possibly longer. We're likely going to pursue implementing trend in an entirely different way.

[RoniRos]

Ok. But I guess it's important to note that this is a temporary removal, so the code is still likely to be needed.
By "implementing trend in an entirely different way" you mean the backend calculation, not the front-end visualization, right?

[capnrefsmmat]

Right; we plan to remove direction from being computed by the API, experiment with different direction estimators in the API clients instead, and then work out a way to make the new method easily accessible to viz.