Incorrect timezone handling

[jwilner]

Your timezone handling is incorrect. Presumably you want to be counting down to the first UTC instant of 2020, i.e. 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z or 1568039770 as a Unix TS.

Your TS construction looks like it tries to get that value, but it doesn't do it properly:

var death = moment("20200101", "YYYYMMDD").utc().toDate()

This initializes a timestamp in the browser TZ, converts it to UTC, and then returns it to a Date in the browser ts. For example, in Central European Time:

console.log(moment("20200101", "YYYYMMDD").utc().toDate().getTime() / 1000)
1577833200

This is the incorrect value.

Either you could pull in moment's timezone extension and do something like moment.tz("2020-01-01T00:00", "UTC") or you could lose the readability and just pass in the desired instant in ms: new Date(1568039770 * 1000).