kahdojay

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!

Oops I misread it as two pieces of feedback even though you explicitly said one. I agree - changed!

Thanks, and thanks for the feedback! How would you want to see it highlighted? Show some slope measure for a given curve?

My wife and I worked on this as our first coding project together! She recently learned how to code and I recently started my software engineering career. It was a good creative outlet for us during these dark times.

We wanted to make a map that didn't feature large overlapping blood red circles everywhere and to give people a better sense of the geospatial data at a glance. We then wanted to show the curves at a more granular level, like the FT is doing so well now (https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest), so you can see an entity's curve by clicking on it's marker.

Would love to hear your feedback!