Bing made the best coronavirus tracker. Seriously.
As my quarantine hits day 40, I've settled on a routine for checking on the coronavirus data that floods the internet every day. Instead of looking at multiple sites, I go to Bing. Yes, Bing.
It's messy online. One site shows you the rate of new cases, the other recovery and fatality rates. Over there, logarithmic graphs of total cases.
To cut through all the noise, I go to a site I never used before the pandemic broke out. Everyday I refresh the Bing tab that I opened on my laptop around March 18 and haven't closed since. I was working remotely in Peru when the coronavirus was classified as a pandemic. I soon realized I was going to be here longer than I had planned.
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The Bing COVID-19 Tracker is impressively organized, easy to use, and clear. And it surfaces relevant news articles, thanks to Bing, Microsoft's oft-forgotten runner-up to Google Search.
The layout is what distinguishes it from other trackers. It features a map view, overview graphs, comparison graphs, and color-coded relevant numbers, but not enough to overwhelm you. I can quickly type the name of a city, state, or country to find out how it's doing. A separate graphs tab provides more options.
Google has some impressive data, like its community mobility reports that show how people in cities and countries are moving around. But when it comes to global coronavirus stats, it's lacking. Something about it is overwhelming and difficult to parse. To look up Peru I have to scroll through a pulldown menu of countries.
For specific counties in California, I'll peek at a New York Times interactive map, but for my day-to-day overview of how we're doing in the U.S. and where I'm quarantined (still in Peru), I refresh my Bing tracker.
There's even a handy comparison tool to stack different countries, like China, Spain, and Italy, onto one graph. You can look at active or total cases, and, somewhat morbidly, deaths. Every graph offers an "expand" button, so you can see what's going with a fullscreen view. Each day the main tracker page lists the increase in number of active cases, recoveries, and deaths, so I can see the daily increase. Since I'm stuck in Peru, I set it the country to one of my "saved locations."
Most coronavirus trackers are very U.S.-centric, with impressive breakdowns by state and major cities. But for the rest of us who want to see the available data — no matter how incomplete and inconsistent — for where we are holed up, we need something more global.
Johns Hopkins University coronavirus map was a favorite tool in the weeks leading up to the outbreak in South America, but once cases arrived and then grew it wasn't as easy to navigate and interpret numbers as the Bing tracker. With a strict quarantine in Peru, any improvements in the data could nudge the government to let people exercise outside, go out after 6 p.m. (there's a curfew in place), or start deliveries from restaurants since only grocery stores and pharmacies are currently open. So I'm closely monitoring the situation.
And like that, Bing is now part of my daily internet life.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
