# S3 E6: Analytical challenges during Coronavirus

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2024-04-22
- **Format:** Video · 70 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Analytics, Data visualisation
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/s3-e6-analytical-challenges-during-coronavirus
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7uVI6Eb0RU

In this episode of Datum, Ravi and I discuss the peripheral analytical impacts and opportunities thrown up by the coronavirus pandemic. We cover the economic fallout and fragile supply chains, the scramble to move education online, Google's mobility data, healthcare data reporting challenges, and broader social shifts including universal basic income.

## Key takeaways

- Global supply chains are far more fragile than they appear, and even a one-week stoppage causes cascading just-in-time delivery failures that take months or years to unwind.
- Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports expose location data showing compliance with social distancing, released as PDFs rather than CSVs to make extraction more cumbersome.
- Misreporting of UK death tolls stemmed from only counting hospital deaths, illustrating how data collection definitions and reporting lags distort official statistics.
- Germany's high testing capacity reflects context, a decentralised federal health system and a domestic hub of testing companies, rather than something other countries can replicate instantly.
- Folding@home crowdsources idle computing power to simulate protein folding for cure research, growing from 30,000 to roughly 400,000 contributors in two weeks.

## Chapters

- 0:16 Framing the opportunities
- 2:31 Scale of impact versus past crises
- 4:21 Economic and political fallout
- 8:58 Fragile supply chains and just-in-time
- 12:29 Google mobility data and shopping
- 18:10 Education forced online
- 31:05 Healthcare data and reporting challenges
- 35:55 Testing debates and NHS context
- 40:08 Healthcare tech and Folding@home
- 44:30 Social distancing and communication
- 50:40 Universal basic income

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/s3-e6-analytical-challenges-during-coronavirus

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena