A publicly-available MD COVID-19 metrics that I didn’t investigate much is cases per ZIP code. I created a dashboard where you can highlight one zip code at a time. Tyler Fogarty built a cool Treemap Explorer. Silver Chips has a nice heatmap of all zip codes as part of their extensive dashboard (a bit like the MDH dashboard). How can we make sense of all this?

A classical way to see it is to look at the daily number of positive cases, similarly to what I did for counties or the state.

Today (May 30, 2020), 4 ZIP codes have more than 1,000 cumulative cases: 2 in Prince George’s county (20783, Hyattsville, and 20706, Lanham) and 2 in Montgomery county (20906 and 20902, both in Silver Spring). But among the ZIP codes with the most recent daily positive cases, 21223 and 21224 are also in the top 5, both in Baltimore City. All these ZIP codes are in counties that are closed or partially opened, highlighting the need for these regions to remain vigilant and enforce stay at home, wearing a mask and social distancing (at least).

I’m looking at protests in Baltimore and I can’t imagine how detrimental the spread of coronavirus will be and will add to the other issues. Here is what Prof. Murray advise to protect protested (on top of any other precautions):

Harm reduction for protests in a pandemic:
•wear your mask + eye protection + heat resistant gloves
•yelling can spread droplets, choose signs, drums, or similar noise makers
•stick with a buddy group to keep your unknown contacts low
•carry water + hand sanitizer + bandages

— Ellie Murray (@EpiEllie) May 30, 2020

There is no public data about hospitalization per ZIP code nor deaths per ZIP code. But there are certainly other ways to make sense of this metric …

To be continued …

As usual, you’ll find other graphs on my page about COVID-19 in Maryland and the data, code and figures are on Github.