I spent some time last week looking for a page that shows detailed per-province charts for COVID-19 cases and while there are some out there, they either combine numbers in the way that is hard to digest or they are just too small to be useful.

Fortunately, Government of Canada provides a CSV file for a download on their Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Outbreak update page, so for a couple of days I would grab that CSV file and massage it in Excel to look at how things progressed. However, Excel doesn't quite understand dates formatted as dd-mm-yyyy, so I had to convert them every time before adding data to a chart. Other data representation oddities didn't help either, like having empty columns for some data and N/A values for other.

After doing Excel for a couple of days I decided it was just too much work and wrote a small page that shows charts for most data series from the CSV file for each province using Highcharts. Here is the page for anyone looking for same kind of data.

blogs.stonesteps.ca/covid-19

Note that the CSV file appears to come from this site, but this is just so same-origin policies do not block XHR requests from the charts page. The data is proxied through this site from the virus outbreak update page.

Update 2022-12-09

Since this post was made, Health Canada changed the CSV format a few times and in 2022 they dropped daily counts completely, which makes the charts rendered by the page referenced in this post fairly useless. This page served its purpose and has been removed now.