COVID-19 GIS Python Scripting Project

By Aaron Hernandez

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, government agencies have been critical in reporting daily numbers of new cases.  This day-by-day reporting has been useful to give viewers an understanding of the situation as it evolves.  As this daily reporting has been useful, there is still much more to be explored about on the COVID-19 pandemic.  Most visualizations of new data are in the form of charts, bar graphs, line graphs or dot density maps showing the change in cases, deaths, rates, and the accumulation of these variables.  My scripting project entails to show a different visualization of COVID-19 pandemic.  In this project, I construct an overall timeline of the pandemic in the State of California by counties.  This timeline will be presented on a map that will animate the progression of the virus spread in the state through the number of new cases reported in each county on a daily basis.  This animated “time-series map” of California is intended to give a long-range perspective in how the accumulating rate of cases spread in a spatial manner through the California counties.

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Disclaimer: As this was my first ever python project, there are visible errors shown in the GIF. The most obvious flaw is that the color codes are not consistent through the entire animation.