I worked in a team of five to create a coronavirus data visualization using R Shiny.
Deployed at: https://burnhc.shinyapps.io/project-covid/
As not only individuals who are experiencing this unprecedented time of a global pandemic and emergency, but as students at the University of Washington, where fellow peers and others have unfortunately been not so pandemic-friendly in their practices, causing outbreaks to surge, Covid-19 and the current response has been all-consuming in our lives through its impact on our sense of normalcy and safety as it has for everyone. As we continue to see numbers rise and tensions grow, this issue and the overall instance have grown to be a great topic of interest for our group. It has deeply affected our families and us individually, and we are eager to learn and discover more by delving deep into the subject. This topic is not only extremely relevant on a global scale (and local as we wish to work specifically on the case of WA state), but it is incredibly important. By interacting with the data surrounding this field, we feel that that process may give us a new level of understanding, perspective, and contextualization to bring to the metaphorical table of discussion and base of knowledge on the critical topic of Covid-19 and government/policy response.
We found a website called The COVID Tracking Project which keeps track of a variety of data. The University of Minnesota has a data driven project that keeps track of the hospitalizations that are caused by Covid-19 . Another data driven project, Covid-19 Behind Bars , is from UCLA Law, which keeps track of Covid-19 in the prison population.
- https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard
- https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/daily-summary.aspx
- https://covidtracking.com/race
The first dataset we are using is an XML spreadsheet of the number of cases of 2020 COVID-19 deaths by week of illness onset, county, and age in the state of Washington (categorized by age groups: 0-19, 20-39, 40-59, 60-79, 80+, and unknown). The data spans from March 8, 2020 to October 11, 2020. The data is current as of October 11th, 2020, and it has been updated every Sunday. It is collected by the Washington State Department of Health.
The second dataset we are using is an XML spreadsheet of the overall coronavirus cases counts and hospitalization/death rates by city, health reporting area, and zip code in King County, Washington, The data is updated as of October 19, 2020. It has been collected by Public Health - Seattle & King County epidemiologists and gets reported to the Washington State Department of Health, and is cross-checked by hospitals and investigators to ensure the accuracy of the data. Only positive or negative test results are reflected in the counts and exclude tests where results are pending, inconclusive or were not performed.
The third dataset we are using is a CSV file of coronavirus case racial data of states and territories in the United States. It contains data about the number of cases and deaths of coronavirus by ethnicity. The data spans from April 19, 2020 to October 21, 2020 and is updated twice a week. It has been collected by the COVID Tracking Project and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, and it is compiled taken directly from the websites of state/territory public health authorities. One thing that makes this dataset unique is it is collected by many volunteers by hand; that is, volunteers manually update the data by visiting state/territory public health websites once a day, annotating any changes to data sources or data anomalies as they go instead of relying fully on web-scraping and other automated harvesting methods.