Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 772

The Financial Times has some of the best charts/graphics that I have seen on the coronavirus and its impact. They're also free and regularly updated . Below is the cumulative number of deaths, by number of days since the 10th death (last updated March 23 at 21:00 GMT). I prefer this to the number of cases because it is more precise, though impacted by things like demographics. The number of cases is impacted by how good you are at testing. Some countries have been far better than others. And what we are continuing to learn is that lots of people were and are completely asymptomatic.

Seeing China (and Iran?) continue to flatten out is encouraging. (Note the logarithmic scale.)

Here has been the impact to the Chinese economy. It's slowing coming back.

And here are traffic volumes around the world. This chart was published on Sunday, March 22. At that time, Tokyo looked to be largely business as usual.

Smartphone user data is hugely valuable at a time like this. Which is why governments all over the world from Israel to South Korea are using aggregated telecom data to try and track how their citizens are moving during this pandemic.

Some are calling this a violation of digital rights. I don't know enough to comment on that specifically, but I do know that the value to society as a whole is clear. It strikes me that if we knew (1) who was infected (you know this by doing widespread testing ), (2) where people have been, and (3) where people are today, we would be in a much better position to contain the spread.

To that end, Singapore's Ministry of Health has been publicizing a surprising amount of information regarding its cases. And that data has been in turn made into interactive maps . You can see who is infected, where they live and work, which hospital they were admitted to, and so on. Is this an overshare? Or is this price of collective health and security?

The New York Times has similarly gone and visualized the movement of people and the virus using data from major telecoms, Baidu , and other sources; though in this case it is more of a retrospective view of what went wrong as opposed to a proactive management tool. The argument they make is that Wuhan's lockdown was too little, too late.

According to the NY Times, 175,000 people left Wuhan on January 1st alone. Throughout the month of January, outbound travel from Wuhan accelerated as many started to fear a lockdown. About 7 million people left in January. Where they travelled to can be found here . Would it be too draconian to use this kind of mobile phone data to see who is obeying a lockdown and who is not?

Images: New York Times

Phaidon -- publisher of books on art, design, architecture, food, and fashion -- has a new publication coming out this summer called, Studio Gang: Architecture . They are describing it as: " An in-depth exploration of one of the most important, innovative, and creative architecture practices working today ." As most of you know, we are working with Studio Gang on an important project in midtown Toronto . And so we are of course thrilled to see the firm's work being celebrated. To pre-order a copy of the book, click here . They are supposed to start shipping around mid-May.