A while back I heard someone talk about COVID statistics and how Seniors were the majority of COVID deaths. I tried to find a place to look up this information, but it was really hard to find. Most data dashboards out there usually would list cases with “rolling averages” or “7-day averages” and all sorts of statistical information that I wasn’t familiar with or thought the information wasn’t too helpful.
After all, how relevant are the case numbers if I can’t see how many people are recovering or dying from COVID-19?
I came up with an idea. I wanted to create a centralized place to look up deaths and mortality rates for each state, which would further empower people to understand how lethal an infectious disease like COVID could be, as this type of tragic event has had the second effect of massive collections of data by the CDC and other groups.
I set off to find data sets that included information on as much groups as I could find. I found a few data sets but they weren’t reliable or were summarized. I ended up finding data sets from the CDC themselves, which made me extremely happy.
Last night I published my first version of my COVID Demographic dashboard. It lists COVID deaths by group (age/race) by state. I’ve also calculated percent of deaths and mortality rates for each state and displayed graphs for each major data set group.
There are data tables below the graphs where you can sort each statistic by clicking the top row in the table to change the sort order or type in the “filter” row (case-sensitive). Below that are some notes and explanations about each group and how the numbers are calculated (for instance, many states don’t report child deaths below 10 deaths to preserve their privacy, etc).
I’ve been working really hard on this for the past few weeks, doing research and coding for hours almost every night. It’s been a great experience expanding my knowledge about, not only programming, using frameworks, and deploying code to a PaaS, but also learning more about infectious diseases and getting data from authoritative sources like the CDC.
I would love it if you checked out my project. Please dive in!
https://covid-state-demographic-data.herokuapp.com/
Feedback and questions are welcome, as I want to continue to make improvements and other types of information. Please also share this app with anyone who you think would be interested in this kind of data. The more we know, the more we grow!
Thanks!