China region vs China country

[ivan-aksamentov]

In the web app, currently there are 2 "China"s in the list of locations. One is region ("China") and another is country ("CHN"). We need to disambiguate these.

Are these still different?

Options:

• remove region
• remove country
• rename region to "China region" or similar

[huddlej]

From a user perspective, I would want to be able to filter for China as both a region and a country. China is one of the few countries that have so many people that they get treated as their own "region". We recently updated SARS-CoV-2 subsampling logic to treat India like China in this sense.

An example of when I'd filter for China as region or country is in the seasonal flu H3N2 builds where I want to know what is circulating in China compared to Europe and I also want to compare China with other countries in Asia like South Korea. The main reason for keeping China as both region and country in the Auspice context is that Auspice filters AND across metadata columns instead of ORing.

I like that the frequencies app already allows mixed selection of "region" and "country" (ORing across metadata columns). In the current context of the app, I can tell that the three-letter codes represent countries and the other geographic options (e.g., "Europe") represent regions. I wish that the app was aware of the distinction between different geographic resolutions, though, and communicate that to users akin to how Auspice supports filters for different resolutions:

For example, I'd prefer that the frequencies app displayed "South Korea" as an entry among a list of all countries instead of the current "KOR" among a list of ungrouped geographic labels.

[huddlej]

...which I see you're already doing in #27, @ivan-aksamentov 😄

I guess the comment above can be my 👍🏻 for the new features!