Tag: map

This map should be taken with a grain of salt. It is primarily a learning activity for me.

How I made this map

  1. Downloaded Anne Arundel Elementary School District Shapefile from Anne Arundel County Open Data website.
  2. Uploaded Files to MapShaper. Used MapShaper tools to simplify school districts so they will load faster. Exact boarders are not important for this map. Downloaded simplified Anne Arundel County Public Schools elemenary school districts.
  3. Uploaded simplified shapefile to Datawrapper. As a new choropleth map.
  4. Added data about Anne Arundel County Public School elementary school cases as of September 14, 2021 and reported on their data dashbaord. Not all elementary school districts had data listed. I entered no data went data was not reported. This results in a grayed out section of map. The “tooltips” do not work for these sectors. Alteratively I could enter “N/A” however when I tried that solutuion the areas ended up colored.
  5. Adjusted visualization on Datawrapper. Published map. Embeded map on this website.

Total Reported PubliC Elementary School Cases

Total cases represents active student and teacher/staff cases as of September 14, 2021.

Data NoTeS

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.

Default Dot Size

Smallest Dot Size

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.

Notes

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.

Update

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 made two maps about Maryland virtual learning programs for the 2021-2022 school year using data presented by the Maryland State Department of Education at the July 27, 2021 meeting of the State Board of Education. I appreciate that MSDE collected detailed data, but I found it difficult to process and understand. So, I made a map.

The first thing I did was separate the data into two maps: 1) elementary school and 2) middle and high school. I did this because this was the major divide in most counties about virtual learning program offerings.

I did my best to accurately portray the data published by MSDE, but I did make some assumptions and judgment calls. Sometimes it was not 100% clear about the meaning of the responses, so I did my best. I also errored on the side of simplicity because this is a graphic that is intended to give a basic idea of what is happening, not an essay.

Elementary School Virtual Learning Programs 2021-2022

In map form, it is much clearer that nine counties do not have any virtual learning programs in 2021-2022 for K-5 students. Four additional counties only offer virtual learning opportunities for certain (upper elementary) grades. Ten counties and Baltimore City offer virtual learning programs for grades K-5. I almost just wrote, all K-5 students, but that would not be accurate. Most jurisdictions restricted access to the program. Most jurisdictions had a set number of enrollments for each grade.

Middle and High School Virutal Learning Programs 2021-2022

The map shows that two counties do not offer any virtual learning programs for middle and high school students and an additional county only offers virtual programs for sixth-grade students. I believe that Howard County only offers a virtual program for sixth-grade students because generally students in seventh grade and are above are 12 and over and eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Nine counties on the Eastern Shore will be offering virtual learning programs through the Eastern Shore of Maryland Educational Consortium. I believe that the consortium will be using APEX as a vendor. In addition the consortium, two Eastern Shore will also be offering their own blended virtual program to middle and high school students. Further, eleven counties and Baltimore City will be offering blended virtual programs to their middle and high school students.

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.

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.

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