Using COVID-19 Data in Power BI to Understand Global and Business Impacts

The COVID-19 Coronavirus has made for some very challenging times. It is affecting us personally with our families and of course, in business. I began to think about ways we can learn from this data and analyze daily COVID-19 Coronavirus case data from the CDC to better understand global and business impacts.

There’s a lot of data out there – one very consumable dataset my colleagues and I found was curated by The Computer Science and Engineering Group at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It contains daily updates about worldwide outbreaks, cases, deaths and recovery rates.

From that I created and published a report using Power BI. In my report page menu, you’ll see I have many report pages showing case trends over time, trends and forecast, trends by country, case rate of change, among others. For example, when I look at my case trends over time page from the day I recorded this video, I can see what the CDC reports as far as confirmed cases, the percentage of increase compared to the prior day, and how many recoveries and deaths have been reported.

I encourage you to look at this report and think about how you can use this in your business to get insights to help you make decisions. We have a few clients that are looking at how this is affecting things such as their supply chain, orders and their employees so they can proactively respond.

You can drill down to get more insightful information and be able to compare things like the recovery rates against new cases to see progression in the recoveries vs new cases. Sometimes we may not easily find what we’re looking for, but we can use things like machine learning and other data science techniques,  we can look at data in different ways, we can look for correlations and be able to make forecasts.

I hope this report can be helpful to you in a production scenario. We could bring this data into Azure Data Lake with Azure Data Factory, and we could cleanse the data and it could be integrated with business data to define correlation and makes forecasts. This will help to make proactive decisions based on this critical information.

Watch the video below to see how I can dig into different parts of this report to gain insight that can help me make some important decisions during this difficult and tumultuous time. To see my latest update to this report on my blog site which I will update frequently, click here.  We are here to help. With our remote offerings, we can help keep your business on track. Visit our website or click below to learn more. 

Stay safe and healthy.