There was no US map for tracking COVID-19 cases at a county level, so we at USAFacts made one. Now even the CDC uses it. Ask us anything!

Wasn't Infection2020.com doing county by county the first week of March?

Yeah, I've been using it since then.. my eyes rolled when I read the title.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Same with the NYT map, its broken up by* county.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

John Hopkins has a map reporting by counties as well.

They had a map up since the first cases started showing up in the US.

I even have this screenshot that I took of the JHU map when there were only 6 confirmed cases in the US.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Same with the weather channel app.

The Weather Channel is one of the many organizations and companies using our data.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Once was enough.

[deleted]

If you'd like to read more about our mission: https://usafacts.org/about-usafacts/

They're trying to make money shhh

We're a not for profit. You can read more about us here: https://usafacts.org/about-usafacts/

Same with the Indiana state landing page, has been doing county reporting this whole time.

As we've mentioned in other posts, we were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Yeah, plus major newspaper like NYT and LAT were tracking counties in their respective states since March on their websites.

As we've mentioned in the other posts, we were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

The Weather Company was reporting by county in an interactive map very early on as well

Correct! They are actually one of the many organizations and companies that are using our data.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

You claim to be USA "Facts", and in your title you claim, "There was no US map for tracking COVID-19 cases at a county level, so we at USAFacts made one."

People come in and point out there's literally been county-level maps (covidactnow.org is one I've followed at a county level since late March at least, backed by Stanford and Georgetown's med schools), and you're moving your goalposts.

You seriously don't understand why people are upset with you in here?

Look, I'm one of your early supporters. I loved the concept of USAFacts. But it seems to have become "USAPsuedofacts". You were supposed to be a bastion of a reputable bipartisan fact source.

But here we are now.

So this is the way it looks:

1. You lied. You straight up know there have been county-level maps, and you lied.
2. You didn't know. Honest mistake. BUT you're trying to establish credibility. So you spent X amount of time creating this without even doing any research that this had already existed? Or maybe you personally (the person running this social media) didn't know. Either way, this heavily hurts your credibility and ability to claim any expertise.
3. You made a typo. Honest mistake again. BUT you're now doubling down and moving the goalposts.

You posted just under this downvoted comment 3 hours ago a doubling-down and moving the goalposts. Then only about an hour ago, you then apologized.

Guys, get your shit together. This is embarrassing and further setting USAFacts up for failing in the mission many of us were so excited to see years ago.

Stanford is one of the many organizations that actually use our data. The list also includes:

Feeding America White House Task Force CDC Stanford (multiple organizations) City of Seattle, Office of Innovation Department of Defense Federal Reserve Palantir CDC Google Kaiser Permanente US Marshals Service Seattle Children’s Hospital data.world Code for SF Govlab MIT

We are not familiar with this source in particular but many organizations have been integral in reporting county-level information.

USAFacts focuses on collecting government data, and in this case, we took the approach of only using county- and state-health department information. At this point in time, the data itself is the largest value add in our view.

Johns Hopkins has been tracking at a county level for a while, why the misleading title?

Haha yeah I was going to say I've been tracking my county since early March on Johns Hopkins. OP's non apology is full of crap.

It's just odd to me that if they're going to throw their hat into the ring for COVID visualization and promote it that they wouldn't acknowledge other groups doing the same thing. I think some other comments suggest that they are aware of some, but to still fail to acknowledge other groups' efforts is disheartening. I wanted to give benefit of the doubt and see if their tools provided anything different but its pretty basic compared to what other tools exist, even lacking in some areas (i.e. no recovered data?). the data does line up with my state/county when compared to the JHU so its good to know both are consistent.

There are many other great organizations out there tracking COVID data. We're the data behind many of the organizations you may be thinking of, including:

Feeding America White House Task Force CDC Stanford (multiple organizations) City of Seattle, Office of Innovation Department of Defense Federal Reserve Palantir CDC Google Kaiser Permanente US Marshals Service Seattle Children’s Hospital data.world Code for SF Govlab MIT

You are correct. We apologize for the misleading title and have acknowledged our mistake in the introduction.

Do you regret doing this AMA?

Not at all. We always jump at the opportunity to talk with the public. Our mission is: 'Government data to drive fact-based discussion.'

so what makes your app superior to the JHU map?

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

Thanks for the question!

We certainly do not think our map or the underlying data is superior to datasets from organizations like JHU -- in fact, we work with JHU, and they are a vital part of our data quality checks.

USAFacts provides data as another layer of information during the crisis. Each dataset is slightly different, and having more than a single "canonical" dataset provides the fullest information to public officials, journalists, and everyday people who are watching the pandemic unfold.

http://bing.com/covid has tracked cases at the county level for quite some time. Do they use your data?

Bing data is available here for download: https://www.bing.com/covid/dev

We are not aware of explicit citation by Bing, but the CDC is listed as a source, and USAFacts does provide county-level to the CDC for publishing.

Our data is 100% from county and state health departments. We don't use news sources, hospital reports, etc. in our reporting.

Do you find it ironic that your organization's name is USAFacts, but your statement that there was no county based US map is in fact not an actual fact? Do you really think you were the first to make a county-based map 3 months after this hit the US hard? Trying to understand why the claim to be the first...

Sorry for any confusion. We didn't just make the map. We've been tracking data since Jan 22. We've been busy with that and are only now doing the AMA.

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Johns Hopkins has one that shows COVID 19 at the county level. Am I missing something?

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Why do graphs always show and anchor on total cases versus new cases per day? Do I really care about all the old cases or do I want to see how new cases are tracking?

This is a great question -- we have kept our cumulative totals because it was how we first began to report the data. Both have their own utility, and we are working on incorporating this into an API so users can more easily get access to new cases per county.

The reason we are putting focus behind an API instead is because it's far more extensible and makes it much easier to iterate. Additionally, we have some products in the works right now that will focus on new cases as we move into a "Recovery" phase (although, of course, the nature of the pandemic remains unclear).

Here’s my question: many, many, many people made county level coronavirus maps, including myself.

On what remote theory is the work you did special in any respect and, if it isn’t, do you not feel any shame for exploiting the pandemic for entirely unjustified personal self promotion?

Our mission is: 'Government data to drive fact-based discussion.' You can read more about us here: https://usafacts.org/about-usafacts/ The team has worked hard at finding a way to scrape the most accurate data from county websites. Not a small task. There's a reason this list of companies has decided to use our COVID-19 data to make their decisions:

Feeding America White House Task Force CDC Stanford (multiple organizations) City of Seattle, Office of Innovation Department of Defense Federal Reserve Palantir CDC Google Kaiser Permanente US Marshals Service Seattle Children’s Hospital data.world Code for SF Govlab MIT

Thank you for your question -- we are interested in promotion in so far as making the resource known/available to anyone who might want to make use of the map or underlying data.

The map itself is a visualization on our web platform for users who want to engage with county-level data. However, the underlying data is sourced from county and state health departments and is used by the CDC.

We are nonpartisan, noncommercial, and not-for-profit, and do not accept donations or contributions.

This site has been doing it for months

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Why are you so set on misinforming the public about the lack of a map for county level data, when there have been dozens of them around for several months?

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

Hi! Puerto Rico and other territories aren’t included in the map, any particular reason?

Thanks for your question!

We have Puerto Rico data that we collect for a variety of federal agencies making use of it. We haven't gotten around to publishing it quite yet because PR is a bit different in how it reports numbers compared to the 50 US states.

It's absolutely a priority to include in the near future -- we will need to wait for when we roll out our API because including it in our standard datasets will break backwards compatibility for many users.

How well do you think the US is responding in comparison to other nations? What could be done better?

Thanks for your question! Comparing the US response to other countries becomes tricky for a few reasons.

1. Geographically, the US is enormous, and our government is largely decentralized. As a result, we see 50 different crises in 50 different states, and each state has the mandate to administer its response.
2. Our health/public health infrastructure, too, is incredibly decentralized. There are thousands of hospitals in hundreds of hospital systems, all of whom have different methods reporting information to their respective health officials. Coordination, as a result, becomes incredibly difficult, and what we end up losing is the ability to understand the crisis effectively (e.g., get real-time data on cases, hospitalizations, PPE availability).

USAFacts has developed an infrastructure to ingest the data as quickly and accurately as possible from 3000+ county health departments in the country. Still, our scope is limited to just that -- data collection. A lesson we are all learning for the future is that coordination by our governments in these circumstances is critical.

The hopkins map doesnt track to the county level?

Our apologies, we should have done a better job communicating in the title. We'll do better. We were one of the first (or possibly the first) to collect and report at the county level. Yes, JHU also was an early county reporter but they stopped reporting at a county level for a time while USAFacts was able to consistently report this data.

How many people did you guys have working on this to aggregate all the data??

In different ways, it's been a team effort on the part of our ~25 person team. At this point in time, we can maintain the data (e.g., curate anomalies in ingestion, build out parts of the ingestion pipeline, and work with our CDC/WH counterparts) with a team of about 3 people.

Most of our data is pulled through our data collection infrastructure, but we do manually input numbers from a number of states like CA, which has little centralization on a state health department level.

I'm curious about your data collection infrastructure.

I'm getting into Data Vis for work and really admire what your team was able to put together.

Thanks for the note! We have multiple approaches to collecting data, including HTML scrapers/parsers (e.g. we use these for states like WV), connecting to API endpoints for state dashboards (e.g. for FL).

If you have any specific questions, feel free to drop a comment/DM, and happy to send any insights or thoughts!

Are you getting pay or reimbursement of some kind for the use of your aggregated data?

Nope. We are a not-for-profit. You can read more about us here: https://usafacts.org/about-usafacts/

We do not get paid or reimbursed for our work. We're a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to make government data accessible and free of charge.

Have you guys been following 1point3 acres or the NYTimes? They’ve been keeping a county by county map for a while now.

We're definitely aware of other projects of this kind and they're valuable in tracking this constantly evolving issue. We can't speak to the methodology of other projects, but we will say we're proud of how we count our numbers. We only source from state, county and other local sources.

I created a report for my work that grabs the St. Johns data and presents it for each county we have a presence in, so I may have to start grabbing your data.

I have been wondering where the "Recovered" data comes from when we see the stats for each country or state? How does the CDC or WHO know how many are recovered?

"Recovered" is a data point we published at one point, but we have hesitated to do so now because each state (and sometimes county) can have a different definition of recovered and it's notoriously difficult to track.

But a disclaimer that USAFacts doesn't wade into that territory,. At the end of the day, we focus on just reporting what we receive from state/local guidance or CDC.

edit: removing some commentary on how one might compute recovered cases, will add back in shortly with citations and references

Place I work at even has an internal covid tracker that shows county level. Why lie?

There are many Covid trackers out there. We were just one of the first and one of the most trusted. Here's a list of companies and organizations using our data:

Feeding America White House Task Force CDC Stanford (multiple organizations) City of Seattle, Office of Innovation Department of Defense Federal Reserve Palantir CDC Google Kaiser Permanente US Marshals Service Seattle Children’s Hospital data.world Code for SF Govlab MIT

Curious, how are you getting the data for the tracker?

Thanks for your question!

We source every data point to state, county, and local government sources. We aggregate every state's data every day through a combination of scraping and manual data entry.

Have you considered adding more resolution?

I like this idea for larger aid and support services. I think it would more valuable with more resolution so I can use the data as an individual. I would like to know where the cases are in my city or neighborhood. If there are 10 people who test positive at my grocery store or gym in the last 3-4 days, then I could avoid those areas to avoid the virus. Just knowing there are a number of cases in a county may not be useful to me.

We would like to add more resolution if possible, but different states and counties report on varying levels, and reconciling these pieces has proven to be quite a challenge. For instance, zip code level data is available in Dallas, but certainly not for all 200+ counties in TX.

The USAFacts dataset compiles data from state- and county-level sources -- as with any government data, we aim to make it easily accessible and free of charge. Compiling the data is nontrivial, and collecting from the lowest possible level (county, generally), has utility in that it takes a while for county numbers to be rolled up to the state level and reported to the CDC/WH, etc.

Aside from your ability to code and process the data from the different counties reporting cases, what expertise do you have on this virus? What expertise do you have to analyze data like this? Or does your expertise lay purely in compiling the information into an understandable visual format?

I'm seeing a lot of questions about the virus, rather than the methods used to compile and display this data and I'm curious if the persons these questions are directed to are even qualified to answer those questions.

Thanks for the question -- and an important one at that. As you note, we are not public health experts, and we'll be diligent about either 1) explicitly stating that in each response if appropriate, and 2) defer to other sources if possible.

We collect data, and in the wake of the pandemic, have gained significant insight into a public health problem that is inherently rooted in the data (or rather, the lack of it). Our scope is and always remains in government-reported numbers, and given the import of data in the crisis, our role escalated significantly.

Public health data is inherently epidemiological -- consider a scenario where a state begins reporting confirmed cases (positive test results) and probable cases (for instance, based upon the direction of a health professional). If we are a source of data, we are then put in a position where we have to "decide" whether or not to include both numbers in our reporting.

Fortunately, we do work in close communication with both the COVID Task Force at the White House and the CDC, so we never have to make these decisions without direction from people who are experts in the field.

Why on earth do you use Pink as the "low # of cases" color and a dark green as the "high # of cases" color? Red for good and green for bad is like... the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

Also, this graph in particular is not even remotely a11y-friendly.

Thank you for your feedback. We'll consider for the future.

Do you think the data shows that we are ready to be reopening? Do you have any thoughts on the possibility of a resurgence?

Great question. We're a data team and are best at helping to make data more easy-to-understand for everyone. It's best to let doctors and the politicians who run the country use this data to make those decisions.

the "per 100K residents" map seems almost random, except for NYC (e: and the Reservation(s) at 4-Corners)

wtf is going on with that outbreak in SW Nebraska Kansas/ W Oklahoma?

You can definitely include SW Kansas in this list too. While we don’t want to generalize, these counties are relatively low population areas which have dealt with outbreaks related to meat-processing plants. Earlier this month, the CDC attributed 4,913 cases to workers of meat processing plants. https://usafacts.org/articles/meat-industry-2020-covid-19-outbreak/

Are there any results that surprised you?

We've been consistently surprised by how difficult it is to get consistent reporting from states and counties even at this stage in the crisis. It's easy to think that the CDC/NIH, etc. can enforce certain types of reporting, but their mandate of collecting + reporting data is actually quite limited.

I wouldn't expect you to shame the worst, but which states and local jurisdictions have the best and most usable data sources for you to use?

Virginia has a truly impressive reporting system that tracks the daily data we are aggregating publicly as well as easy to use demographic, testing and hospitalization data. https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/surveillance-and-investigation/novel-coronavirus/

Are cases reported in the county where someone resides or in the county where they were tested?

This depends on the state/county. For example, NY reports fatalities in both the place of residence and place of death. Day-to-day, we sometimes see a reallocation of cases/deaths from one county to another.

Why are you doing the CDC’s job while not being funded like them?

We're a not-for-profit and our mission is 'Government data to drive fact-based discussion.' You can read more about us here: https://usafacts.org/about-usafacts/

Thank you for making an effort to provide more accessible data! I've been trying to find something for a bit but have come up empty (may not be looking in the right places). Is there any source you would trust for deaths by month? The more granular, the better, obviously, but by state and month would be a great starting point.

Just curious to compare March 2009-2019 vs. March 2020, then total March 2020 vs. "expected" March 2020 + reported COVID. Same for April onwards. Hopefully the last comparison comes up even, but until I see it for myself...

Thanks for taking a look. You can download the .csv and pull the deaths per month there. The download button is below the map. You might also be interested in: https://usafacts.org/articles/top-causes-death-united-states-heart-disease-cancer-and-covid-19/

Shouldn’t there be some type of per capita graph? Of course, more populous states have more of everything, but on a per capita basis, they might not be so bad.

You can view the data per 100k residents. It's an interesting view. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/

There is a lot of negativity in this thread about USAfacts misleadingly claiming to be the first.

I don't particularly care who was the first, but when I started modeling the virus there were not of easily accessible data. I see this thread lists quite a few, but I still thank USAFacts for being another detailed data source. Whether it be the first or not.

So in that regard, thank you USAFacts for providing data. My only question is that why is there such a huge swing between your data and other sources? Some claim almost 15% at times.

Good question. We can't speak to the methodology of other organizations doing similar work though we are fully aware that our numbers may differ in some instances. We believe this is due to the fact that we only source once the state/county/local government reports the numbers. The government sources may be slow to confirm cases, hence the delay.

How does it feel knowing that your country was so unprepared for this disease, that not even the CDC was properly equipped with this tool that you designed to track these cases?

(Serious question by the way, this isn’t taking a stab at America)

Thanks for the question -- it really brings to light some critical issues our policymakers + government face in making decisions. In the middle of a pandemic, our agencies were not equipped to centralize and aggregate this information effectively.

Hopefully, it will serve as a lesson learned that we need to do a lot to move our decision-making on a state and federal level to 21st century standards. Many of the adjacent data (for example, # of hospital beds in a hospital) is collected only once a year, and the timeliness of this information became critical in a crisis.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your hard work!!!! I live in the southwest and some of our counties are so large, they could be states. My question. How do you track the Navajo Nation stats? Do you fold the data into each separate county across the three states or do you do a one count for the nation and another divided among the counties?

Thank you for your question -- Navajo Nation itself has a robust reporting of cases within its jurisdiction.

We defer to how the states report the data (Utah, for example, rolls up numbers accordingly from tribal nations within the state). Arizona, on the other, we have little visibility, and this has been something on our radar for a while; however, understanding how these numbers are incorporated by states is often challenging.