Visualizing COVID-19 Data in Miami-Dade County

• Activity Number: 88 - Data Visualization in Practice
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2021 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Gabriel J Odom* and Roy Williams and Mary Jo Trepka and Emir Veledar and Zoran Bursac
• Companies: Florida International University and Florida International University and Florida International University and Baptist Health South Florida and Florida International University
• Keywords: COVID-19; data visualization

Abstract

COVID-19 represents an unprecedented challenge to policy makers as well as those entrusted with capturing, monitoring, and analyzing COVID-19 data. Effective public policy is data-informed policy. This requires a liaison between public health scientists and public officials. This paper presents innovative data science visualization techniques used in advising public officials in a large metropolitan area from March 2020 till present. In order to effectively do this, an R Markdown report was created to iteratively monitor the number of COVID-19 tests performed, positive tests obtained, COVID-19 hospitalization census, ICU census, the number of COVID-19 patients on ventilators, the number of deaths due to COVID-19 and more recently immunizations. Several new statistical and graphical visualization approaches are introduced to depict trends in testing and positivity rates, death data monitoring with lags in reporting, as well as case-counts and hospital use to name a few.