The pandemic that started 2020 was an outstanding event with negative public health and social impact in most - if not all - countries in the world. Such an unprecendent situation created a management challenge for health authorities and a story telling challenge for the media. None were prepared for the situation. After observing the problem for a while, I worked on putting together 3 repositories that might help interested citizens in gaining intuition about the complicated mechanisms of epidemic behaviour.
If you would like to understand the dynamic of an uncontrolled epidemic, the relationship between R0 and other parameters, how many cases per day are expected for a virus with certain properties, which percentage of a population would be simultaneously infected, the effects of vaccination, etc... start with the following simulation:
https://lo.gic.li/viral-simple
Several other simulations are available in the Viraly repository.
If you would like to see how a public health dashboard with country-wide data should look like during a managed epidemic, you might want to have a look here:
Make sure you look into the Overall Mortality, which is a critical, but often overlooked, public health indicator. The source code is available at the Coviz repository.
If a beloved family member told you there is a miracle drug that cures Covid and the industry wants to hide from you, make sure you read the papers supporting such statements and double check the clinical trials numbers. Get clinical on the topic by visiting the following link:
The source code is available at the Let's get Clinical repository.
All the tools above are introductory level tools intended to help the general public understanding complex phenomena. They are not intended to replace more refined (and complex) tools that public health authorities might resort to when it cames to taking decisions.