New COVID Cases thru Feb 5 2021 by U.S. state, adjusted for population, A Data Visualization
3A few months back, I made a video bemoaning the lack of graphical representations of new COVID cases adjusted for population, as this would be good (if not perfect) information to have to help us tell how well each state's policies are doing at slowing the spread of the disease. It was not easy, but eventually I found a way to obtain the data.
I searched Google for "New COVID Cases STATE" for each state, which turned up graphs Google presents of that information. I saved all 50 pages and wrote a program to extract the data. I then used Wikipedia to look up the population of each state as of 2019. I then obtained a map of the United States with each state a different color and wrote a program to change those colors to reflect the data, created a map for each day from March 1 to July 11 and put that together into my first Data Visualization video.
This is my sixth video, where I have added the date to each image instead of just by month, as well as a color key and added data through Feb 5, 2021, and mostly automated the video creation process. Come March, It will all have to change I'm sure.
For each date I used the data for the previous week, so differences in reporting on weekends wouldn't lead to states blinking on and off. I used an average of the straight values and the log of those values to calculate colors. I did this because while the straight values best represent the human toll of the disease, the log of those values better represent the progression of the disease, as it would unchecked spread exponentially. An average of the two values would I thought do a good job of representing both. But that is why the values for the key might seem oddly chosen.
Since there's usually music over these kinds of videos, I looked up a ragtime drag I wrote and performed a couple decades back that seemed appropriate. It is called "The Ditches Drag."
Hopefully this video will prove informative. If so, I may make more.