Visualizing Proportions of Alpha Variant Cases (a lil data journo)
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID Data Tracker has recently developed a variant proportion tracker. The website utilizes Tableau to create an Excel sheet identifying variants by state. I thought to visualize the effect of Alpha would be useful, being so prominent in the news, so here is a Pareto graph of the Alpha variant by state.
The CDC states that variant proportions are based on representative CDC sequence data that is funded and contracted by the CDC, so this data is primary. The data is also recent, “…data was collected over a 4 week period ending on August 28, 2021” (CDC).
I decided to create a Pareto chart of the unweighted proportions of the B.1.1.7 variant cases, also known as the Alpha variant. This analysis allows us to immediately identify which of the states deal with the “defect” in this case, the Alpha variant. The Pareto chart depicts the variant’s proportion in descending order, allowing us to see which states are most affected by the variety. Through this, we can see visually that Louisiana has the highest proportion of Alpha variant cases compared to the other 49 states. We also see that the data suggests that after Massachusetts (following the descending order), 11 states have yet to see the Alpha variant. →September 14th 2021
