Here is another map of COVID-19 cases in the state of California. How original! I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of these, but this was one I started back in late March 2020 and I wanted to visualize the data for the Los Angeles area to practice more Power BI. It’s interactive!
Originally, this was created to map COVID-19 cases near the offices of my employer to see how close they were. Back in late March, you could see a small upward trend in cases in the Westside of Los Angeles. Eventually though, the cases just overwhelmed the entire county.
The early data I used was from scraped data I gathered from the Los Angeles County Department of Health website. I used Python to scrape the data but it proved to be a hassle to run the script everyday to get new data. I wanted a way to get the data automatically but never found a way. I’m sure I could have built a script that automatically ran everyday but my work schedule started getting in the way.
Then I found a data set from the Los Angeles Times that was gathered from the websites of California counties. This was publicly available on their GitHub page which made things a whole lot easier to automate. I was then able to directly connect the data to my Power BI report.
There’s a lot to dig into but since there are so many cases, visualizing how many cases didn’t seem like valuable info since there are so many other maps online. Also, this totals all cases since mid-March, so the number of total cases is extremely large. If I have time, I may look at what case numbers are like after subtracting recovered cases.
The map is interactive, so you can see stats by date, county, and city. Go full screen for best view. Also, the data really starts mapping on 3/15/20, and you may notice that some counts are off from the LA Times website, but that’s because some county agencies aren’t always up to date.