Visualizing Covid-19 case counts by county in the US

The New York Times is providing data files with the cumulative counts of Covid-19 cases in the United States, at the state and county level. Covid-19 Map is a visualization of that data over time.

"On day one, no one you know is sick. It feels like a normal day. It may stay like this for a long time until, one day, a few people you know are sick. And suddenly a few days later it will seem like everyone is sick, and it will feel like it happened instantly. Everything looks fine until it isn't fine. This is the paradox of pandemics."

— Dr. Joe Hanson @DrJoeHanson on the You Are Not So Smart podcast, episode 177 by David McRaney @davidmcraney

Made with ❤️ in Seattle by @leshill

FAQ

Why is the scale for the colors logN?

Epidemiologists point out that the numbers reported for the US are known to be problematic due to very limited testing of the population (still true as of this commit). Once testing is happening on a wide scale across the US, case counts (and even death counts) will be more representative of the actual spread. The choice of logN seems a reasonable compromise to show incremental jumps as the numbers increase, particularly at the smaller end of the scale.

Disclaimer: I am not a data scientist nor am I an epidemiologist.

What about the data for Kansas City and New York City?

The NYT data has handled these two cities differently than other data. Check the NYT repo for more details, the app does the following:

In the case of NYC, the data is reported for the entire city (and not for each of the five boroughs). Unfortunately, the map shows the five boroughs. Rather than attempt to split the count into 5, each borough is shown with the total for NYC. The 5 boroughs/counties of NYC should be considered a single joint entry.

In the case of KC, the data is reported for the entire city across four counties, and for each of the four counties excluding the city. Not ideal. The four counties for KC are represented as a unit with a single count, summed from each county and the city count. Like NYC, the four KC counties should be considered a single joint entry.

Colophon

Covid-19 Map is an example of a JAM-stack app— JavaScript, API, and Markup.

The app is built with React, Redux, and Redux Sagas. The source code is TypeScript.

The data is pulled from the GitHub API.

The HTML is styled with Bootstrap.

There are no tests 🙀 !?!

Acknowledgment

Thank you @nytimes for making covid-19-data available.

This code is licensed as CC BY-NC 4.0.