As the media was going hog wild for the last couple of weeks over the Swine flu story, the principal actor behind this Swine flu, the A/H1N1 virus with bits of bird and human genetic material, was acting quite tame. This bug with a reputation to cause world wide death and destruction has, for some unknown reason, proven to be far less harmful than the regular influenza bug of the just ended 2008-2009 North-American flu season.
So how harmful was the so called regular flu season? According to CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality reports, nearly 24,000 people in over 115 large U.S. cities died because of the garden variety influenza/pneumonia.
Below are two maps showing flu deaths. The first map has count of deaths one week apart and the second map shows total death counts for the entire flu season of 2008-2009.
Weekly Influenza/Pneumonia deaths: week ending Dec 27, 2008 and week ending Jan 04, 2009
Influenza/Pneumonia deaths: 2008-2009 flu season
Compare these figures to the current swine flu death count of less than couple of dozen. Of course its is plausible that this weak A/H1N1 bug may become more virulent with the return of the flu season in the fall. Its important to remember that its much much older ancestor began as a weak strain in Kansas before evolving into the deadly bug causing tens of millions of deaths all across the globe during the 1918-19 pandemic! So a continued surveillance is the watchword of these uncertain times!
You may access the weekly flu season death count data and the maps on Finder! and Maker! by clicking on these links:
For data:
MMWR (CDC), 2008-2009 Flu Season Weekly mortality by large cities, USA, April 25 2009
CDC MMWR, 2008-2009 Flu season mortality for large cities, USA, 2009
10 Responses to Data Set of the Day: Swine flu vs the regular flu
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A school near me in the UK has closed down for a week.Not even a big city!its coming!!
Why is it policy to post poor quality screen shots? In this case the legend is cut in half and the NW edge of the country is less important. Posting screenshots of an awesome service (Maker! Finder!) does nothing to promote the actual service. If anything it makes the service look like an artifact of yesterday’s web.
Maker! needs to be accessible as a non-membership service. -OR- Maker! should have the ability to stream map data without authentication in embedded maps. -OR- Authors need to embed google/visual earth maps, post direct links. –DEFINITELY- Finder! Should have a preview window that shows the data in spatial form.
Asking viewers to make 5 clicks minimum to get to source data in a spatial format is a poor decision.
PS the ‘View In’ section doesn’t work.
File not found at http://finder.geocommons.co….
Thank you for your very thoughtful comments/critique. Indeed the screen shots leave a lot to be desired when it comes to the quality of the original maps on the Maker! and they do nothing as you rightly pointed out to promote “… an awesome service (Maker! Finder!)”. Your comments are very valuable to us and I will share them with others at FortiusOne so that we will continue to offer useful and quality data, maps and service to the user community.
Apologies that you found the post and data lacking. The GMU professor who did the post used the WordPress image support which is not the best, and we are having the team fix those up. Fair point, but to be honest I’m a bit confused on the rest of the criticism.
Maker is a free service, and the only reason we require you to register to use it so the system can track your maps. Otherwise we’d have no idea whose maps are whose. It only requires an email and password to get going. If you can suggest another way to solve this problem we’d be more than open to hearing about it. This is why you don’t have to register to download data on Finder. There is not a technical reason for you to need to.
It is a good point about having links to the Maker maps in the post. Maybe you missed them, but Raj included links to both of the maps at the end of the post:
“Maker! maps:
The Flu season: Percent deaths due to pneumonia/influenza in large cities in weeks ending 25 oct 2008 and 25 Apr 2009
Flu season 2008-2009: Total flu/pneumonia deaths”
This is also where I’m quite confused about it taking five clicks to get to the source data in a spatial format. The end of the post has all the data in the post as hyperlinks:
“Finder! Data:
MMWR (CDC), 2008-2009 Flu Season Weekly mortality by large cities, USA, April 25 2009
CDC MMWR, 2008-2009 Flu season mortality for large cities, USA, 2009?
When you click on the link it takes you to the metadata page where you can download the data in a variety of spatial formats.
We thought about including a data preview on the Finder metadata page, but it ended up being duplicative since if you click “make a map” it shows you the geometries on a map. If your user experience was diminished because this step requires you to register, that is a fair point, and something we can look at for feature requests.
Thanks for the feedback and I hope the response clarifies some of the issues you had in reading the post.
best,
sean
Also @pslarkin, to be clear from a technical perspective (putting on my geek hat). You don’t need to register a user account to view or embed maps. It’s only required for creating new maps or importing new data.
Regarding links – GeoCommons is a RESTful service – so all data is available via a direct link depending on the format you want.
Ha! Well my tail is between my legs for sure. I drank far too much coffee this morning. Thanks for the concise responses. I understand a bit more why the services are offered as they are. In respect for this interesting post I will attempt brevity as well.
I love this blog for the maps and the unique datasets. I hate this blog for hiding maps and data behind links. It is hardly ever obvious as to what link will shoot to Maker/Finder! (This post being a example of good organization) Maybe if in a post writing session an author can use a template that organizes data and links, as to present them in a standard way for readers. What would ultimately be most useful are posts with embedded maps, but might be a nightmare from a technical/bandwidth perspective.
Thanks!
Thanks – Good point on the templates especially when it comes to a uniform way for letting readers know where the links to data and maps are. We’ll see what can happen. The embeds work well but if we have too many it makes for slow load times for the blog home page. Hopefully will have a long term fix for that in the future. Appreciate the feedback.
best,
sean
Clarification: My blog post may have created a false impression that the 2008-2009 flu death count was entirely due to seasonal flu. Just want to point out that the 24,000 death count for 115 cities combines “flu and pneumonia” deaths and thus one cannot determine how many deaths were caused by seasonal flu alone. Thanks to WSJ’s “numbersguy” Bailik for pointing out the folly of attributing all deaths to flu only. The blog does not say that all deaths are due to flu alone but readers may think otherwise.
BTW, he has a very interesting blogpost in today’s WSJ,titled “Flu’s deathtoll” (http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/the-flus-death-toll-689/). Among other things he discusses how the often quoted seasonal flu death count of 36,000 is really CDC’s best estimate of deaths due to flu “…given the flaws in the death-registration system.”
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