  With the rapid continuing spread of COVID-19, it is clearly important to be
able to track the progress of the virus over time in order to be better
prepared to anticipate its emergence and spread in new regions as well as
declines in its presence in regions thereby leading to or justifying
"reopening" decisions. There are many applications and web sites that monitor
officially released numbers of cases which are likely to be the most accurate
methods for tracking the progress of the virus; however, they will not
necessarily paint a complete picture. To begin filling any gaps in official
reports, we have developed the NewsStand CoronaViz web application
(https://coronaviz.umiacs.io) that can run on desktops and mobile devices that
allows users to explore the geographic spread in discussions about the virus
through analysis of keyword prevalence in geotagged news articles and tweets in
relation to the real spread of the virus as measured by confirmed case numbers
reported by the appropriate authorities. NewsStand CoronaViz users have access
to dynamic variants of the disease-related variables corresponding to the
numbers of confirmed cases, active cases, deaths, and recoveries (where they
are provided) via a map query interface. It has the ability to step forward and
backward in time using both a variety of temporal window sizes (day, week,
month, or combinations thereof) in addition to user-defined varying spatial
window sizes specified by direct manipulation actions (e.g., pan, zoom, and
hover) as well as textually (e.g., by the name of the containing country, state
or province, or county as well as textually-specified spatially-adjacent
combinations thereof), and finally by the amount of spatio-temporally-varying
news and tweet volume involving COVID-19.
