Today, I'm going to call attention to mapmaking by one of our Cartographica users, Stephen Taylor. You can see his Animation of Covid-19 New Cases, and updates to it on his YouTube Channel. The illustration uses a colored circle to show the daily count of new cases for each county relative to the county's population. We're happy that Cartographica could be one of the tools that was helpful in bringing this animation to life. Stephen, commenting on his work: The project started in early April when I and the circle of friends tried to come up with a way of …

Due to the quick-moving nature of the COVID-2019 (2019 Coronavirus Disease), we are not going to publish any maps here directly, as they would be nearly immediately out of date. However, if you're interested in the latest updates from the World Health Organization you can visit their Coronavirus disease 2019 situation reports page to get the latest. They are posting a new report (PDF) daily. In addition, There is a daily map being produced by a number medical establishments available at HealthMap.ORG, complete with links to a data archive on GitHub.

The PEW Research Center recently released a report about the changing birth rate in the United States. According to the report, "The overall U.S. birth rate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15 to 44, declined 8% from 2007 to 2010. The birth rate for U.S.-born women decreased 6% during these years, but the birth rate for foreign-born women plunged 14% — more than it had declined over the entire 1990-2007 period. The birth rate for Mexican immigrant women fell even more, by 23%." The report mentions …

West Nile has increasingly become a concern of U.S. health professionals and officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. A recent interview reported in USA Today revealed the concern that the CDC is giving the recent West Nile outbreak. According to the article, CDC Director of Vector-Borne Infectious Disease, Lyle Petersen, is quoted as stating, "We think the numbers may come close to or even exceed the total number of cases reported in 2002 and 2003, both of which were severe West Nile virus years." According to CDC numbers there were more than 250 deaths due to …

The recent Supreme Court decision to uphold President Obama's health care plan has been received with mixed feelings across U.S. states. The goal of the health care plan is to ensure that all American's have an equal opportunity for health care insurance. A key aspect of the Obama health care plan was to expand Medicaid to cover those who were not covered by Medicare. This expansion was meant to fill the gap for people who couldn't afford insurance, but were determined to be poor enough to be exempt from the penalty for not holding insurance. The penalty for not …

The Center for Disease Control monitors various diseases within the United States. Often the CDC produces data for public use that can be used for scholarly and educational purposes. For this post I downloaded diabetes data from 2009 from this CDC website. The CDC are available for download in .xls format, so they need to be converted for use in Cartographica. After the data are downloaded, load the files into a spreadsheet program and save the file as a .csv. According to CDC data more than 25 million Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes and the rates of diabetes have …