Please see the data notes from the elementary cases post.
I am aware that George Fox Middle School has been renamed Northeastern Middle School, but I am not sure how to change the name in the shapefile. I will need to figure it out in the future. Schools without a physical district are not included.
This map should be taken with a grain of salt. It is primarily a learning activity for me.
Total cases represents active student and teacher/staff cases as of September 14, 2021.
These notes are taken from the Anne Arundel County Public Schools data dashboard.
1. The tables on this page reflect positive cases, confirmed by testing, with an onset date of September 8, 2021, or later that have been made known to Anne Arundel County Public Schools. Schools/Offices with zero student or staff cases do not appear in the tables. The data also includes cases of COVID-like symptoms in which a person is not tested for a period of 48 hours after onset of symptoms, and probable cases, which occur when an individual with a COVID-like symptoms is found to have close contact with someone who is COVID-19 positive. Such cases are treated as if they are positive for COVID-19 in terms of identification of close contacts and potential exposures. Cases that appear on this dashboard and are later determined to be false positives or the like will be deleted in subsequent updates.
2. An “active case” is one in which the individual who tested positive is still under 10-day quarantine.
3. A positive case, COVID-like symptoms case, or probable case does not mean the individual exposed others at school or work, or that the individual contracted the virus at school or work.
4. Students enrolled in virtual-only learning and who are not part of any extracurricular activities are not included in this data.
5. Due to differences in reporting methodology, this information may not match the data presented by the Maryland Department of Health.
Anne Arundel County County Public Schools published data today regarding COVID cases in public schools. Their reporting metrics are different than those reported by the State. I decided to map and publish it. I have not yet checked the data. I need to publish the data to check it.
After playing with the map a bit I decided that the dots were rather overwhelming, so I shrunk them to their smallest possible size. The dots size for the other maps was the default size. I will need to remember to consider dot size in the future.
These notes are from Anne Arundel County
1. The tables on this page reflect positive cases, confirmed by testing, with an onset date of September 8, 2021, or later that have been made known to Anne Arundel County Public Schools. Schools/Offices with zero student or staff cases do not appear in the tables. The data also includes cases of COVID-like symptoms in which a person is not tested for a period of 48 hours after onset of symptoms, and probable cases, which occur when an individual with COVID-like symptoms is found to have close contact with someone who is COVID-19 positive. Such cases are treated as if they are positive for COVID-19 in terms of identification of close contacts and potential exposures. Cases that appear on this dashboard and are later determined to be false positives or the like will be deleted in subsequent updates.
2. An “active case” is one in which the individual who tested positive is still under 10-day quarantine.
3. A positive case, COVID-like symptoms case, or probable case does not mean the individual exposed others at school or work, or that the individual contracted the virus at school or work.
4. Students enrolled in virtual-only learning and who are not part of any extracurricular activities are not included in this data.
5. Due to differences in reporting methodology, this information may not match the data presented by the Maryland Department of Health.
The Anne Arundel County Public Schools data will be updated each Wednesday.
I learned how to create a map with only Anne Arundel County, which required me to find a JSON geofile of Anne Arundel County and convert it to the correct file format. It works, I hope I’m allowed to use the files I used to make the base map. I think I will be able to add other Anne Arundel County open data to the map in the future. I added the Anne Arundel County school-associated cases to the map to see if it rendered correctly. It does.
I’m not sure why the bottom of the map is cut off. I will have to explore that issue next.
Out of curiosity, I updated the school outbreak-associated cases map to reflect the data as reported by the Maryland Health Department on September 15, 2021.
After my experiment using smaller dot sizes, I updated this map to also have the smallest dot sizes. I think it is easier to read.
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.
The Maryland Health Department published updated numbers today, so I decided to see how long it would take me to update the map. Because I set up my spreadsheet properly it did not take very long. I just popped in the new case information and then exported it to the map. I used the NCES School Directory. Two schools were not in the directory, Blue Heron Elementary, which I added to the database, and the Success Program, which I did not add.
Since this map only shows schools with active cases, many of the schools with “decreasing” cases are not shown on the map. The Maryland Health Department list includes private schools. This map only shows public schools because I have a spreadsheet with public school addresses already set up. Private schools could be added if I spent the time to look up each address. I have not fully checked the map yet as I am just experimenting with the capabilities and my database skills.
As a note, some school systems’ first day of school is September 8, 2021.
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.
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.
