Visualizing and assessing US county-level COVID19 vulnerability.

Background Like most of the world, the United States’ public health and economy are impacted by the COVID19 pandemic. However, discrete pandemic effects may not be fully realized on the macro-scale. With this perspective, our goal is to visualize spread of the pandemic and measure county-level features which may portend vulnerability. Methods We accessed the New York Times GitHub repository COVID19 data and 2018 United States Census data for all United States Counties. The disparate datasets were merged and filtered to allow for visualization and assessments about case fatality rate (CFR%) and associated demographic, ethnic and economic features. Results Our results suggest that county-level COVID19 fatality rates are related to advanced population age (P Conclusions Unique COVID19 impacts are realized at the county level. Use of public datasets, data science skills and information visualization can yield helpful insights to drive understanding about community-level vulnerability.