US Covid 19 statistics

While I was looking for a topic to work on I came across Coronavirus on Google Trends. The site featured the topic and it shows information about certain keywords people all over the world are searching on the internet. Keywords ranges from "Vaccine", "Testing", "Variants" to questions such as "Where to get covid vaccine?", "Which covid vaccine is best?", and even "How long does covid vaccine last?". This piqued my interest to come up with a tool that would collect publicly/open sourced covid-19 related data and would aggregate the results visually through charts.

When I browsed CDC and looked at the Covid Data Tracker I saw information mostly statistics of cases in the US in general. But when I started narrowing down by state, this made me more curious because now I am getting relevant data pertaining to my geographical location. This is when I got that aha moment to make a covid statistics application that would provide useful information that are relevant to people living in the US. Data such as vaccine distribution, testing results, hospitalized patient numbers, cases, and even mental health are some of the data that are useful to collect and use.

The application uses Facebook's Create React App as its base toolchain. I searched public data through Open Data Network and chose three dataset endpoints: CDC, Health Data and NHIT and then used Socrata SODA API to construct my query filters and make requests. I then used Chart.js to model the response data that I received.

The main goal of the app is to educate and inform. I implemented minimal styling through mobile first design and added a custom svg logo icon. I also implemented alternating chart types (horizontal bar, vertical bar, and line) which breaks the repetitive pattern making it a little more interesting. Finally, I used different chart colors to provide contrast and data association.

Covid-19 has impacted our society in so many ways. It has impacted businesses, jobs, healthcare, transportation, education, travel, dining, recreation, etc. Understanding where we are in our fight against the virus is meaningful to me. I believe that it is worth the time and effort to come up with a tool that will help educate people to help decrease the spread of the virus. The more we are informed the better we are in making the right decisions.

To learn more about this project you can view the live demo or visit the code repository to learn more about this project.