Thanks for the feedback! We did have a lot of discussion about whether we should be showing per capita numbers and throughout the process the numbers have grown quickly and we kept changing it, first from cumulative case numbers, having to change the thresholds, then changing to deaths as a more reliable signal of how bad things are generally, so this is just where we landed as of a couple weeks ago in terms of how to color the markers.
I do agree that it can be misleading to suggest that 1k cumulative deaths in somewhere like Michigan is the "same" (color-wise) as somewhere like Brazil and normalizing by population would address that. OTOH, I do think it's a valid use case to draw the attention to where the absolute death numbers are highest as well regardless of population at least based on our own curiosity, but perhaps that's more appropriately done in a simple ranking table.
We were actually thinking of repurposing the marker colors altogether to reflect on the "flatness" of a geography's death curve, but not sure if we want to trade off on quickly answering the question "who has it worse off, right now?"
Some things for us to consider, thanks again!