Keeping up with the COVID-19 data published by Anne Arundel County Public Schools on an individual school basis is not really sustainable because it is currently being published daily. The data can not be downloaded so it has to be transcribed by hand. So I am looking at some other ways to visualize the data that might be less time-intensive, and still informative. My primary goals are to 1) learn how to build various data visualizations, and 2) explore the utility of various data visualizations. Maintaining a data dashboard, unless I am curious about the data that day is not my primary purpose.

One idea is to look at the cumulative COVID-19 cases by both students and staff on a daily basis. I did not think to capture this data earlier, so I have a few days of data missing. I also have missing days because life got in the way. It doesn’t seem hard to enter in a few data points every day until you get wrapped up in life and then you realize that you haven’t even looked at the website in a few days. I wish that they published the data in a way that I could download their archival data, but I will take what they share. The Maryland Health Department publishes their archival school outbreak data; however, their data only reflects outbreaks (as they have defined them) and is only published once a week on Wednesdays. Because of the missing data, I used the step model of lines as I think it is a more honest way to show the data.

This line chart shows the cumulative daily COVID-19 cases for students and staff for the 2021-2022 school year. The number of cases are from the Anne Arundel County Public Schools data dashboard. I have added dots for the days that I recorded the published data. There are no dots on the days that I do not record the data.