Importing the WHO’s COVID-19 data into SQLite

I downloaded the WHO CSV of covid data and imported it into SQLite to query it as follows:

$ sqlite3 covid-data.sqlite3
SQLite version 3.11.0 2016-02-15 17:29:24
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> .mode csv who
sqlite> .import WHO-COVID-19-global-data.csv who
sqlite> .schema
CREATE TABLE who(
  "Date_reported" TEXT,
  " Country_code" TEXT,
  " Country" TEXT,
  " WHO_region" TEXT,
  " New_cases" TEXT,
  " Cumulative_cases" TEXT,
  " New_deaths" TEXT,
  " Cumulative_deaths" TEXT
);
sqlite> select sum(deaths) from (
   ...> select " Country", max(cast(" Cumulative_deaths" as decimal)) as deaths
   ...> from who
   ...> group by " Country"
   ...> );
508456
sqlite> select " Country", max(cast(" Cumulative_deaths" as decimal)) as deaths
   ...> from who
   ...> group by " Country"
   ...> order by deaths desc
   ...> limit 8;
"United States of America",126573
Brazil,58314
"The United Kingdom",43730
Italy,34767
France,29760
Spain,28752
Mexico,27121
India,17400
sqlite> select max(Date_reported) from who;
2020-07-01

The cast is necessary because otherwise the sorting is performed ASCIIbetically, producing the wrong answer. Here’s Argentina:

sqlite> select Date_reported, " Cumulative_deaths", " Cumulative_cases" from who
   ...> where Date_reported in ('2020-05-01', '2020-05-15', '2020-06-01', '2020-06-15', '2020-07-01')
   ...> and " Country" = 'Argentina';
2020-05-01,215,4304
2020-05-15,345,6973
2020-06-01,530,16214
2020-06-15,819,30295
2020-07-01,1283,62268
sqlite> select Date_reported, " Cumulative_deaths", " Cumulative_cases" from who
   ...> where (Date_reported like '%-01' or Date_reported like '%-15')
   ...> and " Country" = 'Argentina';
2020-03-15,2,45
2020-04-01,24,966
2020-04-15,101,2336
2020-05-01,215,4304
2020-05-15,345,6973
2020-06-01,530,16214
2020-06-15,819,30295
2020-07-01,1283,62268

For Derctuo I want to be able to do queries like this interactively and easily (more easily than SQL) and plot the results. The CSV in question is 1.07 megabytes, but gzips to 191kB, and I suspect would be under 100kB with a simple column-oriented database doing delta-compression.