COVID-19 New Cases per Capita by Abt Associates

Early on during the COVID pandemic the media were focusing on “flattening the curve”, trying to keep cases from growing exponentially. I started trying to figure out how much better or worse states in the US were doing and started to focus on two metrics: the rate of COVID positive cases and how the cases were increasing or decreasing recently. These visualizations helped me see that relationship better, both by state and by county. The state trends are in a map so that someone can easily find a state, and so that they can see patterns geographically. Showing the top and bottom ten states by growth in cases and number of cases can highlight where a state may have had a high rate of cases but is now decreasing, or a state where the rate has been lower, but is increasing quickly. Similarly, it can highlight a state that is doing poorly in both metrics. As the pandemic kept progressing, and as waves of variants changed the scale of cases, I added the ability to see just the recent 30 or 90 days or the recent year, or to see all dates. The data came from a data.world connection to the Tableau COVID-19 Activity csv file, which was most recently based on the JHU CSSE COVI-19 Data and The New York Times. These data stopped being refreshed as of April 29, 2022. At this point people were using rapid tests at home which were not reported to states, so the cases became less accurate and less relevant.