Show HN: Richly interactive map of COVID-19 cases by US county

covid19map.us

3 points·freedmand··9 comments

Hi HN,

I couldn't find a richly interactive COVID-19 map anywhere that includes historical data, so I made my own. I used SvelteJS and deck.gl to create a fast and functional frontend. The dataset comes from USAFacts[1].

Source code can be found here: https://github.com/freedmand/covid19map

[1] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

Here's a map from Johns Hopkins: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

I've definitely seen/used that map, which as far as I know is one of the authoritative ones worldwide. I wasn't able to see how to paginate back in time with that map to view growth, which was one of my primary motives for building this one. Is there a way to do that with the John Hopkins map?

One very useful metric would be the percentage of cases in each county. That's missing from most every map you find.

Good point. I was thinking about that and will plan to add it in. You think something like cases per 100,000 would be a good metric?

Everyone uses either cases per 100000 or cases per million. Of course it's a messy number due to unequal access to testing, but eventually it will even out.

I get disappointed when cool stuff like this is made with <canvas> instead of <svg> because I want to look at the DOM, and understand how it was made, but I can't.

That being said, this is a great visualization.

Thanks for the feedback. I love SVG and actually iterated with that at first, but getting the site to be zippy and responsive required using WebGL

It's not a criticism of choosing the canvas element, that is completely reasonable. All I'm saying is, there could be better tooling for inspecting them and how they work.

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