Michael Walker

Mapping COVID-19 in Massachusetts Cities & Towns

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Kudos to the Baker Administration for providing transparency in a critical matter of public safety. As Pioneer Institute’s Senior Fellow in Healthcare, Barbara Anthony, urged in The Boston Globe, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health upped its game and started posting the count and rate (per 100,000) of confirmed COVID-19 Cases in Massachusetts by City/Town. They will update the numbers each Wednesday. https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-cases-quarantine-and-monitoring

Taking this data, Pioneer created different ways to view the data:

    • Scatter charts – Showing cases by population, with and without Boston (which is the outlier).
    • Rankings – Largest to smallest number of cases and rate (cases per 100K population)
    • Heat Maps – Of the infection rate, by county and municipality
    • Table – By municipality & county, of the total number of cases, rate of infection, and the population (for reference)
    • Testing – Graphs, a table and map showing number of people tested, testing rate per 100K population, and percent of positive tests.

Note: For populations <50,000, <5 cases are reported as such or suppressed for confidentiality purposes. In our graphs and tables, for those small towns with some reported cases, we assigned them 3 cases so the maps would draw correctly.

We plan to update the maps during the crisis after DPH releases weekly data.

 

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