Weekly Viz 2018-06-18

U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 0618

This week’s topic is U.S. Influenza Surveillance dataset. It includes the number of Influenza-like cases since 1997 in the US. One tricky part here is that, from the dataset, you may think the number of Influenza-like cases have been increasing dramatically over time. However, when you look carefully at the data, you will see the number of data providers are also increasing in line, which wrongly signaled the increase of cases.
You can find the complete report here.

My Visualization

Due to the issue I mentioned above, instead of showing the absolute number trend, I decided to plot the the percentage of cases by children and the elder over time, to understand when these two groups are more likely to catch influenza.
I spent around one hour to produce the below heatmap dashboard. You can hover on the heatmap to see the distribution of each age groups on that particular quarter as well.
Also, please notice that there is some data quality issue, that you will see some blank from 1998 to 2002 during Summer seasons.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• For both children under 4 May to June and Oct to Dec are two seasons that they are more likely to catch an influenza - temperature typically varies a lot during these two seasons.
• For the elder (age 65+), we cannot see any obvious seasionality pattern regarding months. However, we can see some years they are more prone to the Influenze than other years - maybe due to the type of Influenza popular in those years.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)