I've often got ahead of myself...thinking that "this" as in "this particular project"--must be ready for PRIME TIME. Only to find that the real learning begins when the first prototype is released. Such is the case with our Dashboard, first released four weeks ago, and now in its embryonic trial by real users. Try it, at https://anywhereanytime.io/covid19/ and see what you think. Fully interactive, county by county, for any date range you'd like--comparative stats are trivial, you'll find.
Where does the data come from? We use seven sources, primarily USAFacts, the Johns Hopkins Center for Engineering, the 1point3acre Covid 19 site, the New York Times and the Washington Post
All are virtually the same, but occasionally they are out-of-sync, and we pick 'the best'. Data itself comes from County Health Departments, and the problems of this are rife--my own county last week announced that they'll only report on weekdays sans holidays. So Tuesday is usually a "Big Day" in the press, as they roll Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday data together. Counties in some states are forbidden to share Nursing Home data, others asked to forego sharing Food Processing cases--something about causing 'undue fear in citizens'.
What were our initial learnings?
First, the choice of colors for the Choropleths--red and blue. Turns out many observers thought this was a political statement, even though the Red Splotches were in fact mostly Blue Urban centers, and the light Blue to Blue areas were more the rural segments of America. But go figure--everything these days, whether wearing a face mask to thwart (hopefully) Covid19 spreading is seen as unmanly or Left Wing Nuts, or opening a disco tech is seen as cavorting with the devil. So we changed RED to ORANGE, and kept the various hues of blue. Not quite as striking for "hotspots" but much more Politically Neutral.
More importantly, the calculation and 'load' time for 3142 counties for all this data is unconscionably slow, so we pre-load California now as the base page, and working from there can be reasonably time-efficient. Always load a second state before dismissing the first one, will affirm for the program that it only needs to calculate the 2 requests, and not all 50 states. Then, discard the first state, and voila, you have the new state replete with counties for about 1/25 the time it would be otherwise
And we now offer three pages--US Counties for each state, US States, and the World in combination with US States. Interactive, powerful, fascinating, and a good way to spend more time than you might think you have available. https://anywhereanytime.io/covid19/
I plant to issue some YouTube instructional videos--tips for using the site--in due course. One is now available. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp0VsSIBx4Q
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