Updated on 2020-03-29 with the latest data and minor style changes.

Once again, I had thought that I was done blogging about either Alteryx or COVID-19… But then the New York Times had to go creating an awesome data set – which you can find here. It is the only data set I have found that has county level data going back to the beginning of the pandemic.

My daughter, Calais Harding, helped me build the maps – it is very time consuming to get right. This time I wanted to make a thematic map that showed both cases and deaths. The trick for doing that – with Alteryx or any other mapping package – is that the thematic ranges have to be set once and reused for all the maps. In this case, that meant we had to use manual tiles. We also picked some colors anticipating future growth in the data. Hopefully it won’t grow too far!

For deaths, we chose to go the blob route. There is a second layer themed on the absolute number of deaths overlaid on top.

Finally, the animated GIF was getting to large for online platforms, so we used ffmpeg to convert to an MP4 this time and upload to YouTube. This really shows the flexibility of Alteryx that you can accomplish all this with 1 click of the run button.

The Alteryx workflow can be found here. And the original high res MP4 without the YouTube processing can be found here.