A Regional Perspective: Showing COVID-19 data across county and state lines
Most information on COVID-19 testing, incidence, morbidity and mortality is being shared by counties at the county and zip code levels and by states at the county level. However, many regions, including New York, Washington, DC, Boston, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, include counties in multiple states. Other states, including Texas, Florida, and California, have multiple, multi-county regions within them. As a result, COVID-19 data provided at the zip code, county or state level lack an important regional perspective.
As more regions consider when and how to return to a new normal, widely shared data that is aggregated to the regional level will be increasingly important to government and public health officials as well as business and civic leaders trying gauge when and how to reopen various aspects of our economies and communities.
Recently, the KC Health Collaborative, a regional health improvement collaborative based in Kansas City, recognized its region would benefit from a single map and aggregate regional totals showing data from the counties within its Metropolitan Statistical Area in both Kansas and Missouri.
The maps were built in a public Tableau server and tap into data collected and shared at no cost by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The maps update automatically once a day, consistent with the update frequency of the Missouri and Kansas state health departments. The KC Health Collaborative has chosen to focus on deaths, cases and per 100,000 rates of each. Any data released at the county level can be included.
For more information on sharing COVID-19 data at a regional level, contact Mary Jo Condon at [email protected].