My COVID-19 Stats Project: Four Years On

Exactly four years ago today, I posted the very first of my 436 daily COVID-19 updates for Wales. From starting on 11th of March 2020, to the final daily update on the 4th of June 2021, I missed just 15 days, all of which were due to Public Health Wales not reporting on those days. After the 4th of June 2021, I continued to post a weekly bulletin (almost) every Saturday, until the 8th of April 2022, as mass PCR testing came to an end. Since then, I have kept an eye on the data, but haven't really shared much.

The Beginning

At the start of March 2020, I was a 16-year-old at Ysgol Penglais, getting ready, and increasingly anxious, for my GCSE exams. In 2019, picked up three A* grades in my science exams, so I was optimistic for good results in 2020. At this point, COVID was one of the least of my worries.

The question I was probably asked most during the duration of the project was why I was doing it. The answer was very simple: I had always had an interest (or, one could say, an obsession) with statistics, be it related to sports, politics, or demographics. I saw COVID-19 as another thing that was tracked with statistics, so I created a very simple PowerPoint slide with the numbers of COVID cases in in each region of the UK on it. Very soon after, I created one with the local authorities of Wales on it, though there were only 19 cases in Wales at the time, so I didn't think it was particularly helpful.

As the inevitable tidal wave of COVID approached, the UK government ran a dashboard with very basic, but, at the time, the best available data on the pandemic. Several people complained on Twitter that it wasn't particularly accessible, and didn't break down to anything smaller than simply the country of Wales, so I decided I'd tweet my primitive but very accessible chart publicly. At first, the reaction was small, as I'd expected. It was supposed to just be a hobby project that a few dozen people might see, and, after all, COVID was going to pass in a few weeks, right?

Early on, some people asked to be tagged in the daily updates so they didn't miss them. I was happy to do so, but it quite quickly became unsustainable, so I stopped.

My following rapidly surged as we approached, and then entered, the full lockdown. This was definitely overwhelming to me. For the first time, the number of people seeing anything I was tweeting exceeded the number of people I could ever theoretically know personally. As a 16-year-old, I had no idea how to deal with it, but ultimately I decided to accept it, and carry on the daily updates. There was absolutely nothing else to do, so the choice made itself. 

The very first of my daily COVID-19 updates for Wales, posted four years ago today.

Public Health Wales launched their Wales-specific dashboard in early April 2020, making their data visual for the first time, but I had already been visualizing their text-based data for weeks by that point, and people found their dashboard clunky, bloated and unusable on mobile devices, so they stayed with my updates. The launch of their dashboard, and the start of the ONS reporting more comprehensive deaths data weekly, made my work a lot more interesting, and thorough.

Ultimately, I stopped posting daily in June 2021, as real life started to catch up with me again. I had just sat my internally assessed AS level exams, and was generally in a much more stressful place in my life. I decided would continue to update the website daily (it wasn't difficult, and most of it was optimized by now), but I would only post a weekly summary to Twitter, as they were, believe it or not, harder for me to make.

The last of my daily COVID-19 updates.

I discontinued my weekly updates, and my website, in April 2022, as mass PCR testing came to an end in Wales, and data became increasingly unreliable. To this day, I continue to monitor and analyse what data is still available, but no longer to a public audience. I feel the demand just isn't there anymore, and my time is a lot more restricted.

The final weekly update can be found here: https://x.com/LloydCymru/status/1513153330453041152?s=20.

Where am I now?

By now, I am in my second year studying biology at Aberystwyth University. It hasn't been too difficult overall (yet), but the hardest period was in early to mid 2023, as me and my partner, Charlotte, had a very bitter and public falling-out with the Students' Union. This blog isn't about that, but I'm glad to report that, whilst I still have no interest in re-joining them, the situation has been quiet for a number of months now, and we are in a constructive dialogue with the University.

Since restrictions ended, I have traveled a lot more, in large thanks to Charlotte, who loves travelling. In all, I have visited the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Albania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway and Scotland since the end of lockdown, and am planning to visit more countries in the coming months. I didn't have much interest in travelling before meeting Charlotte.

Charlotte and I in Kraków...

 ...and in Albania.

In terms of work, I have worked some part-time jobs alongside studying, but the most exciting of them is being a football referee. I qualified as a referee in mid 2022, but didn't register until
January 2023. It's not easy, and I do take a lot of dissent, as all referees do, but the experience in terms of communicating with people, explaining things clearly, and making new friends and contacts is amazing. It's not for everyone, but I do recommend going into it, if you have the fitness, time and patience!

Looking Back Honestly

In hindsight, the whole pandemic period was a horrid time for everyone. I look back at it with great frustration with how the Welsh and UK Governments responded. It feels like we had the worst leadership we could possibly have had for a major crisis, and that a lot of the damage done was a result of that.

At the beginning, I would never have predicted that COVID-19 would contribute to the deaths of 12,600+ people in Wales and 238,000+ people (and counting) in the UK. My heart still bleeds everyday for the countless people who lost loved ones to the virus. I hope that the inquiry teaches those in charge the lessons they need for the next pandemic, but I'm not holding my breath for it. I'm disgusted that the Welsh Government, to this very day, refuses to hold an inquiry of its own, despite what we've seen so far in the Welsh part of the UK inquiry has seemingly raised more questions than it has answered. They owe it to the bereaved families, and they owe it to all of us, who were affected by the decisions taken by them through the pandemic. I don't know I will ever forgive those in charge for the loss of life, especially in the wave over winter 2020-21, when it seemed that they were investing far more effort into avoiding another lockdown than saving lives, a decision which probably cost tens of thousands of lives in the UK, and thousands in Wales.

Politics aside, I look back at my own experience with a strange mix of pride, nostalgia and sorrow. Pride that a project I started in the school library at Ysgol Penglais on a Wednesday afternoon grew into something that informed thousands of people. It was never supposed to, but it did, and I can't thank the countless people that supported my work at the time enough. I know it was so long ago, but honestly, it means more to me than I can put into words. Thank you all so much.

I invested an insane amount of time and effort into the project, and that meant I missed out on a considerable amount of time outside, that I could have spent enjoying the beautiful spring of 2020. I started walking long distances through the countryside that summer, but I should have done more. I just don't have the time to do things like that anymore, but I want to. These walks perhaps weren't the best for my mental health, my mind would drift often, and fixate on the suffering of the world at the time. The normality of the past that seemed so distant, and the uncertain mist of the future. But the physical benefits from the walking, and the feeling of exploration and freedom is something I remember fondly, and would love to get back.

I still haven't wrapped my head around the fact that four years have passed since the start of the pandemic. It's unfathomable to me. It changed my life, and the lives of so many others in countless different ways. I still sometimes struggle to this day to come to terms with how society changed, struggled, and at times came together in 2020. I still feel like I have unfinished business in year 11, having been preparing for GCSEs, which never happened, and yet here we are, four years later. The world has moved on, but I will admit that, in my mind, just sometimes, I wish it could be early 2020 again. I wanted to sit my exams. I wanted a normal year. I wanted a smooth transition into the sixth form.

The biggest lesson I learned from the whole COVID-19 experience is to appreciate what we have. We need to appreciate the world we live in, the people around us, and the experiences we have, because we never, ever know when it could be uprooted. I have always been a reflective person, and perhaps this blog reflects that, but I think the pandemic really entrenched this in me. The natural progression of time has been something I have never been able to comprehend, but when the world takes a pause, that progression is broken, and my memories are now split into pre-lock-downs and post-lock-downs. The period of the main part of the pandemic feels like a blur in time. Even four years later.

Thank you for reading! Feel free to ask me any questions you might have in the comments, and I will try my best to answer them.