Visualizing County-Level Insights into the Impact of COVID-19
Graphicacy partners with JHU to visualize novel view of county level COVID testing data.
The Graphicacy team continued our partnership with the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center with a new data visualization aimed at highlighting the county level COVID cases, testing, and death rate and their correlation to key demographic data.
Tracking and understanding health disparities among historically disenfranchised groups during the COVID pandemic presents a unique challenge. Public health experts announced months ago that disparate burdens were being observed in Black and Latinx communities, as well as among those in lower-income households.
It is important to understand that this information is not exclusively relevant to the groups who are disparately affected by this virus. When certain groups are affected by health burdens more than others due to systemic inequity, the entire population suffers losses in quality of care, clinical outcomes, and experiences higher costs that are paid for by taxpayer dollars.
This new visualization assists health officials, policy-makers, activists, and communities, with creative information design, to comprehensively understand the disparate burdens that are being experienced by people in their locale, which inspires awareness and action. These burdens could take the form of more cases or deaths or fewer tests for underserved counties.
Testing data was previously only available at the state level, but the Coronavirus Resource Center went further and collected and was the first to publish the data at the county level to help show the discrepancies.
Our team used creative information design in a way that intuitively elevated demographic data at the county level, adding a more localized view of how COVID-19 is impacting people by race, ethnicity, or poverty.
The maps are paired with small comparison bar charts that show data from the COVID Tracking Project’s Racial Data Dashboard to further highlight any county-level racial or ethnic disparities in COVID cases or deaths. The tool spots trends in how COVID-19 case numbers or testing rates may differ for certain populations and demographics. And because the data will be updated daily, people will be able to watch these trends over time.
Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the World Bank, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.
