I added in the private schools for the September 8, 2021 data release about outbreak-associated cases in schools and then mapped it. This map shows Maryland public and private schools with outbreak-associated cases on September 8, 2021, as defined by the Maryland Health Department. Information about the trend of the number of cases at each school from September 1, 2021, is shown in the tooltips. As for the public schools, my Excel “database” should be ready for the next release of data on September 15, 2021. And I should be able to quickly create a number of related maps. I may choose to make a color-coded trend map like I did for the public schools for the September 8, 2021 data.
As with the other map I googled the addresses for the private schools. Then Datawrapper mapped the schools. I assume based on my knowledge of the locations of some of the schools that the locations are generally correct, but I have not checked them. These maps are only for my own learning about the software and data visualization. I am trying to get a sense of which type of data visualizations are most useful and engaging. After I make the maps and visualizations I test interacting with them on my computer, tablet, and phone. I have found that some data visualizations behave differently on different devices.
I learned how to add specific colors to an Amcharts treemap. Green indicates an increase of transfer students from that institution to the University of Maryland College Park from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2020. Red indicates a decrease and gray steady. Not groundbreaking, but it did take a while to figure out how to do the coding and then type it all in. Not sure if this is a good or bad way to visualize the data. Like with most of these graphics, first I need to build it and live with it a while before I can judge it.
I am also not sure if it is good or bad for students from particular institutions to increase or decrease. I just used red and green because it is easy to remember.
In the future, I would probably have a range of greens and reds to indicate the scale of the increase or decrease. For today I could not decide if I should code by number or percent, so I did nothing. Also, I am still trying to figure out how to “lighten” a color in Amcharts. I could just type in a different hex color, but that takes the fun out of learning how to do the coding for Amcharts.
To get this to work I needed to add a variable called “color”. I did this by typing “chart.dataFields.color = “color”;” I then wrote “color: “red” (or whatever color) for each institution. According to the documentation by Amcharts you can use many types of systems to set the colors, from just typing the name as I did to the hex color system.
Here are the ways to add color according to Amcharts.
Color-coded treemap of students that transfer to the University of Maryland College Park in fiscal 2020 compared to fiscal 2019. It seems to me that the coding, by the University System of Maryland in particular for the out-of-state students changed between fiscal 2019 and 2020. Also they only show the details for the top 15 institutions in any category.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS Transfer Students FY 2019 and FY 2020
After my last map that shows public schools that have ever had an active outbreak, I got curious about what it would look like to just show schools with current active cases with trend information. Please see the notes for the data in the previous posts.
My kids return to school in person tomorrow so I have been thinking about public school-associated outbreaks all day and different ways to graph the data available.
This map shows schools that have had a school-associated outbreak on 25 August 2021 or 1 September 2021. The circle shows the max size of the outbreak. I first tried sizing by the 1 September 2021 outbreak size, but that eliminated the schools that had an outbreak on 25 August but had zero cases on 1 September. The color shows if the cases at the particular school are increasing, staying the same, or decreasing. The tooltips show the number of cases on each day and the “type” of school based on the NCES School Directory. The two cases at Success Program on 1 September in Frederick County is not recorded because it does not have an address in the NCES School Directory. I will have to decide whether to add the Success Program or to just footnote it.
I also have to decide if I want to add private schools in the future. I would need to look up the address for each private school.
After I made my post about the percentage of schools with school outbreak-associated cases I was curious about the percentage of students with school outbreak-associated cases. I got the 2021 student enrollment data from the Maryland State Department of Education’s report card. I then divided the county enrollment by the number of outbreak-associated cases in public schools as published by the Maryland Health Department on September 1, 2021. I had previously coded each of the schools from the September 1, 2021 data release as public or private. Then I made a map using Datawrapper.
As a note, many schools systems have not opened as of September 1, 2021, and reporting to the Maryland Health Department may be delayed.
As a parent, it is good to see the number of cases in perspective. Although I know that every person’s risk tolerance is different.
According to the previous map I made, 16% of Frederick County Public Schools have a school outbreak-associated case. That seems like a lot, at least to me. However, when I look at this map, I see that less than one-tenth of a percent of Frederick County public school students, 0.07%, have a school-associated outbreak case. That seems less alarming. As to which portrayal is better, at this point I do not know. I guess I will have to wait and see.
What is also interesting about this map is that it is normalized. Both St. Mary’s County Public Schools and Prince George’s County Public School have 6 school outbreak-associated cases. For St. Mary’s County Public Schools it is 0.03% of the student body. For Prince George’s County Public Schools it is 0.00% of the student body, due to rounding because the student body of Prince George’s County is much larger than that of St. Mary’s County.
UPDATE: The Maryland Health Department numbers include teachers and staff. The denominator in the map below just includes students. I will have to see if I can fix these numbers and create an updated map. This is why checking your data is important.
Notes about the Data
These notes are copied from the Maryland Department of Health website.
Note: This dataset reflects public and non-public K-12 schools in Maryland that have COVID-19 outbreaks. Data are based on local health department reports to MDH, which may be revised if additional information becomes available. This list does not include child care facilities or institutes of higher education. Schools listed meet 1 or more of the following criteria:
Classroom/cohort outbreak definition: 1) At least two confirmed COVID-19 cases among students/teachers/staff within a 14-day period and who are epidemiologically linked, but not household contacts; or
School-wide outbreak definition:
2) Three or more classrooms or cohorts with cases from separate households that meet the classroom/cohort outbreak definition that occurs within 14 days; or 3) Five percent or more unrelated students/teachers/staff have confirmed COVID-19 within a 14 day period (minimum of 10 unrelated students/teachers/staff).
Cases reported reflect the current total number of cases. Schools are removed from the list when health officials determine 14 days have passed with no new cases and no tests pending. Archival data is available through the COVID-19 open data catalogue. These data are updated weekly on Wednesdays during the 10 a.m. hour. MDH is continuously evaluating its data and reporting systems and will make updates as more data becomes available.
I pulled data on September 1, 2021, to make the above map. I provided the information on whether a school is public or private. All errors are my own. This map is not official, it is primarily for the purpose of me exploring the visualization features and keeping track of what I learned.
I made a few updates to the percent public schools with outbreak cases map I posted earlier today. I added information in the tooltips about the number of public schools and the number of outbreak-associated cases. For notes on the data and the process please see the earlier post.
I still have not learned how to make a timeline map to show outbreaks over time, although I think I am on the way to figuring it out. I watched the beginning of an 11 hour YouTube tutorial with that end in mind. Since I really want to learn the first principles of coding data visualization I want to take my time. I want to really understand how to build a website using HTML, CSS, and javascript rather than just educated guesses and trial and error (although I am pretty good at that type of coding when I need to make something work). I believe that the tutorial uses the D3 library for visualizations, but I have not gotten there yet. I am interested in learning D3 as I have read that it is very customizable. Although I do not think I have gotten close to the edge of the interesting visualizations I can make with Datawrapper and Amcharts.
Percent Public Schools with Active OUtBreak Map
I really like the outbreak maps I have made showing the locations of schools both public and private with a COVID-19 outbreak, as defined by the Maryland Health Department. However, these maps quickly get crowded and are kind of hard to read unless you zoom in closely. It is also hard to compare counties because counties are not all the same density. Also, the outbreak map by school takes a while to set up because I need to find the street address for each school. I have plans to use the vlookup feature in Excel to make match the names in the Maryland Health Department list, but most of the names do not match exactly so I expect that might take a while.
So, I decided to make a map showing the percentage of public schools with an active outbreak. I got the number of schools from the 2021 NCES School Directory list on the Maryland Report Card website. I had previously coded schools from the Maryland Health Department list from September 1, 2021, as public or private. I coded the list based on googling, I should probably check the list against the NCES School Directory, but I have not done that yet. Then I divided the total number of public schools by the number of schools with an outbreak listed. This was fairly quick, the most time-consuming part was coding the schools as public or private.
It should be noted that many public school systems have not opened yet as of September 1, 2021.
I like many things about this map. The size and specific location of outbreaks are lost, but it gives a general idea of the outbreaks in public schools in the State. I think for my own personal use I would want to see both the location-specific map showing cases per school and this map.
Notes about the Data
These notes are copied from the Maryland Department of Health website.
Note: This dataset reflects public and non-public K-12 schools in Maryland that have COVID-19 outbreaks. Data are based on local health department reports to MDH, which may be revised if additional information becomes available. This list does not include child care facilities or institutes of higher education. Schools listed meet 1 or more of the following criteria:
Classroom/cohort outbreak definition: 1) At least two confirmed COVID-19 cases among students/teachers/staff within a 14-day period and who are epidemiologically linked, but not household contacts; or
School-wide outbreak definition:
2) Three or more classrooms or cohorts with cases from separate households that meet the classroom/cohort outbreak definition that occurs within 14 days; or 3) Five percent or more unrelated students/teachers/staff have confirmed COVID-19 within a 14 day period (minimum of 10 unrelated students/teachers/staff).
Cases reported reflect the current total number of cases. Schools are removed from the list when health officials determine 14 days have passed with no new cases and no tests pending. Archival data is available through the COVID-19 open data catalogue. These data are updated weekly on Wednesdays during the 10 a.m. hour. MDH is continuously evaluating its data and reporting systems and will make updates as more data becomes available.
I pulled data on September 1, 2021, to make the above map. I provided the information on whether a school is public or private. All errors are my own. This map is not official, it is primarily for the purpose of me exploring the visualization features and keeping track of what I learned.
I am not sure which treemap style I like the best. I think it will depend on what I want the treemap to show. It might depend on the story I want to tell with the data.
I have found it is a little difficult to read the smaller categories of the treemaps, which might make them less useful. I expanded the height from 300 px to 500 px, but I am thinking of expanding them further to 700 px or 800 px. I also find the smaller categories sort of difficult to click on.
I have not yet figured out how to make a map with a timeline, so here is a map showing the outbreak-associated cases in schools as reported by the Maryland Department of Health on September 1, 2021. Please refer to my first outbreak map for notes on the data. As with the other map the goal is for me to learn about the mapping software and data visualization using current data. The data and locations have not been checked.
Another way to show the information in a divergent bar chart, like the one I posted a few days ago, is in a split bar chart. Datawrapper staff wrote a blog post not recommending divergent bar charts, so they only offer a split bar chart.
I put together this split bar chart to get a better idea of what the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) results would look like displayed in this manner. In addition to the five score levels, I added a percent proficient column which is level 4 and level 5 added together. Percent proficient is reported in the official data chart and shown in the official column charts developed by the Maryland State Department of Education for the Maryland Report Card. The percent proficient is shown in green on the right of the centerline in my divergent bar chart.
I’m not sold that a split bar chart is always superior to a divergent bar chart. Especially when the data has categories that are distinctly good or bad and no awkward middle neutral category. However, I like the split bar chart. I especially like that it can be easily sorted by percent proficient, which includes levels 4 and 5. For this data, the percent proficient is more important than the percentage of students at each level.
I find it interesting that the percent proficient ranges from nearly 70% to less than 20%. With such a large gap, it is likely that there are methods that can be learned from the higher-performing counties to increase scores (and hopefully ultimately learning) in the lower-performing counties.
Notes About the Data
Values listed as 5.0% are acutally less than or equal to 5.0%. I am not sure if there is a way to show uncertain values in Datawrapper bar charts. In education data with small populations is often repressed. I could probably back into some of these numbers but I have not for this chart as the goal is to look at the data visualization.
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