So… It’s been a week since I’ve last uploaded—allow me to explain why:

Last week, the Ohio Health Department began reviewing and reconciling COVID death data. Almost one thousand deaths from Cincinnati Metropolitan Area counties were added to the rolls. Most of these deaths occurred in November and December of 2020, but they were all reported last weekend. This created an issue with the temporal accuracy of the dataset I’ve been graphing.

For any given date, the New York Times COVID dataset reports the total number of COVID cases and deaths reported for a given county from the beginning of the pandemic to that date. Thus, when hundreds of deaths are suddenly reported for a county, even though those deaths occurred throughout the past month, they appear as though they occurred suddenly in one day—the day on which they were reported.

These things combined meant that when Ohio reported back-dated deaths, a giant anomalous death spike appeared in the NYT data. It also means that the mortality graphs over time are wrong. I wanted to fix both of those problems.

Fortunately, Ohio’s COVID data is available as a CSV file with COVID cases and deaths assigned to the actual dates on which they manifested or occurred. I can use it to correct the aforementioned errors by writing a program to handle the new dataset and combining it with the Kentucky and Indiana data from the New York Times. I hoped to accomplish this last weekend, but, alas, a week later, I’m still figuring it out.

So, in the meantime, I’ll continue publishing graphs based upon the NYT data. Just know that they’re—not entirely correct—for now.

PLEASE READ: I hope the service I’m providing here is of value. If you believe it is, please consider donating to keep the project going. Money is needed to cover the annual hosting fee for this website and the annual license fee for the software used to analyze and visualize these data. I currently pay for everything on my own, and I will continue doing so for as long as possible. But your assistance is greatly appreciated and will ensure this project continues until the pandemic ends. If you are able and willing, one-time donations can be made through the support page, and recurring monthly donations can be made via Patreon. Thanks!

GET VACCINATED IN THE CINCINNATI METROPOLITAN AREA

Click the link for more information: https://eiben.space/covid19-vaccine.

Cincinnati Metropolitan Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_metropolitan_area
Referenced Video: https://youtu.be/54XLXg4fYsc
Data Source: https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data