COVID-19 Maps Side by Side
The New York Times COVID-19 Risk Map
The New York Times recently published several country-wide visualizations of COVID-19 severity. The main visualization allows users to search for specific counties and get up-to-date information on COVID-19 risk, with variables including case numbers, hospitalizations, deaths, test positivity rates, whether these indicators are trending up or down, and how they’ve changed over time. These are then aggregated to place counties into one of five risk categories, which includes low risk, medium risk, high risk, very high risk, and extremely high risk. Each category is assigned a color so that COVID-19 risk can be visualized across the country.
The Times also offers more specific tools, including maps of business restrictions and mask mandates, vaccine distribution, hospital and ICU occupancy levels, impacts on nursing homes and colleges, and reporting on overall excess deaths since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The Uses of the New York Times COVID-19 Map
The apparent utility of the Times’ COVID-19 map is straightforward: it allows you to roughly evaluate your chances of contracting COVID-19 while standing in line at the grocery store or working out at the gym. The supplementary tools add to this, allowing users to evaluate the ease or difficulty of acquiring care in the event of infection (with the hospital and ICU occupancy tool) or showing you how safe it is to sit down at your favorite restaurant.
The Deaths Above Normal visualization gives some indication of how COVID intersects with other points of health and economic vulnerability, and this is where the Times’ tool begins to converge with our interests at CII. It can be difficult to measure COVID-19 case counts and death rates with certainty, and it can be even more difficult to measure deaths resulting from secondary effects of the pandemic. Such circumstantial deaths may include deaths of despair caused by the economic and social stresses brought on by the pandemic, or deaths resulting from hospitals being over capacity, which makes it harder for people to access treatment for other ailments. Secondary effects on mortality includes reduced deaths in some cases too, drawing the thinnest of silver linings, with a prominent example being decreased road fatalities due to people leaving the house less.
The Limitations of the New York Times COVID-19 Map
The New York Times’ COVID-19 map deals in counties’ absolute numbers of COVID-19 cases without considering any factors relating to social context. COVID-19 has disparate impacts on communities due to variables outside of raw case numbers; COVID-19 case numbers are not the same as COVID-19 impact numbers. As we described in a previous article:
It’s entirely possible that two communities could have similar infection rates, yet one experiences more harm due to higher incidences of complicating health factors, such as obesity or respiratory disease. Or it could be the case that two communities have similar rates of infection and complicating health factors, yet one experiences more harm due to economic factors, such as housing instability or lower rates of health insurance coverage.
These are just a few of the numerous variables affecting community outcomes in response to COVID-19. The Times’ tools are informative and useful for keeping up to date with the spread of COVID-19, or perhaps with how vaccine distribution is coming along, but it provides too little information to use for planning resource distribution and outreach. Policymakers, nonprofits, and healthcare administrators will require a tool that accounts for communities’ health and economic statuses alongside infection rates. Such health-related and economic indices also make it possible to predict the future impact of COVID-19 in communities and plan accordingly.
In fairness to the Times, they do offer death rates alongside case counts, which arguably offers a crude method of ascertaining the preexisting health status of a community. If various communities have similar case counts yet dissimilar death rates, this might be an indication that there are differences in underlying health-status concerns, and this information could be used as a starting point to assist in resource distribution and outreach planning. It could also indicate that some communities are undercounting cases, and that too would need to be remedied.
The Community Vulnerability Index and the New York Times COVID-19 Map
The New York Times is a news outlet, and the main utility of their COVID-19 map and accompanying tools is that they provide ongoing news — news on case counts, news on vaccine rollout, and what amounts to investigative reporting on the unseen mortal impact of COVID-19. These tools are an innovative way to keep readers informed.
Our Community Vulnerability Index (CVI) accounts for case counts, like the NYT COVID-19 map, and provides a vulnerability score based on how these numbers intersect with other metrics related to health and economics. This functionality is necessary for nonprofits, healthcare providers, and policymakers looking to distribute resources efficiently and provide help to those who need it most urgently. Furthermore, it offers predictive value on the risk of severe COVID reaction on all fronts in a given community. The CVI’s function is not to inform users of the absolute risk of contracting COVID-19 in their community, so the Times’ map is still a necessary tool for that specific, commonplace use.
