Tag: Maryland

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.

This is a test of taking HTML code from Amcharts LIVE and embedding it into a post. If this works it might make making some types of maps and charts quicker. Although I like the flexibility of building charts and maps from scratch. I am just exploring all of the ways I can do data visualization so I can choose the best tool for the task at hand.

I made the map in amcharts Live and then I download the HTML code. I uploaded the code into my WordPress media file. Then I referenced the media file in a frame on this post.

I have made more treemaps. This time showing transfer students to the University of Maryland, College Park in 2020.

In the first treemap, I show the level 1 names, and the level 2 names are hidden. Clicking on the level 1 names will reveal level 2.

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

In the second treemap, I show the level 2 names at first open. Clicking on the level 1 names will focus just on that level.

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

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.

In my previous post, I built my first treemap using Amcharts. Today I built another treemap, this one is 3 levels deep. I am unsure about the presentation of the data in this manner, it may not actually be very useful. However, since I was able to successfully explore building a multi-level treemap using the Amcharts demo I will call it a success.

In this example, I was able to get the level 1 labels to appear, which I was not able to figure out yesterday.

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

Today I am testing out a treemap that I made in Amcharts. I made a treemap of the students that transfer into the University System of Maryland in 2020. The top layer is the education sector, the second layer is the institution. I am still having a bit of trouble getting it to behave as I would like. I would like the second layer names to appear in the boxes, but I can not seem to get it to work as it does in CodePen. Again I got it to work in CodePen using an Amcharts demo as a model, but again I ran into an internal 500 error when I tried to transfer the code over. So I rewrote the code keeping out the pieces that were not rendering properly.

The treemap clearly shows that there are a large number of transfer students from the US Armed Forces, in part because of the University of Maryland Global Campus. I may make another treemap that excludes transfer students from the University of Maryland Global Campus.

Second Layer Hidden

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

I figured out how to show the size of the institutions before drill down, but not the institution names. There is likely a simple way to show the labels on a treemap in Amcharts, but I have not yet figured out how. I think that I like the first style better, but I will need to test both versions.

Second Layer Shown

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

UPDate

I realized while I was digging into the data further that I missed the 16,362 students that transferred from “other” out-of-state institutions and 5 students that transferred from “other” MICUA/MD private institutions. I missed them because the institution details is only provided for the top 15 institutions in each of the drill-down categories.

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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