Looking behind the numbers
What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened
in your neighborhood? Find out what would happen if your neighborhood was the epicenter of the
coronavirus pandemic in the United States
Washington Post has an interactive map to show how the 200 000 deaths in the US had happened in your neighborhood. If you do not live in the US, you might have visited or have a favorite place there. Try this interactive map.
The novel coronavirus has killed more than 200,000 people in the United States, and if you’re like us, you probably have trouble visualizing that catastrophe. Our graphics team has published a new interactive to help you do so. It maps every U.S. death as if they had all been your neighbors. You can simply type in your address, then watch covid-19 proliferate across your community and likely wipe it off the map.
It can be difficult to comprehend the loss of all these lives in a country so large. The pandemic’s heaviest tolls have occurred in clusters, and many Americans don’t know anyone who has died. But the disease has killed people in all 50 states, the District and most of the territories.
What if all those deaths had happened near you?
To better understand these losses, this simulation shows what would happen if all reported covid‑19 deaths in the country happened around your address.
After you start this experience, you will see a circle drawn around your location: In this scenario, everyone who lives in that area would have died.
How far would this emptiness go?
How does the simulation work?
The radius displayed around you depends on your location and on the number of people who live near you.
In order to determine the size of the radius, we use data from the 2018 American Community Survey, which estimates people living in small tracts such as neighborhood blocks, for every location except Guam, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. In those places, we use 2010 decennial Census Bureau data.
Some tracts are buildings in a city. Others are blocks or neighborhoods. The simulation sums the population of all the tracts around you until it reaches a total that is close to the total covid‑19 deaths in the country.
The full methodology involves drawing increasing radii, calculating intersections and making statistical estimates.
“What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened
in your neighborhood? ” not a single soul would have been left in my Country Ghana talk less of my neighborhood. God has been good.
I agree. I have friends in Lesotho that I was worried about. I am glad the WHO predictions didn’t turn out to be true. Glad to have you as a reader.
Thanks so much. I am a teacher so I got interested in your write up. So you now have a new follower from Ghana.
If the WHO predictions for Africa had come to past, again I say there wouldn’t have been a soul left.