Lyme Disease By County

July 24th, 2015
lyme, map
Yesterday people were excited about a map that was supposed to show risk of catching Lyme by county. Unfortunately, it actually measured something complex but correlated, the year in which the county was first designated "high risk". This is interesting, but I wanted the map I'd hoped to find: annual per-capita cases of Lyme. So I made it:


(zoomable svg)

color annual risk
< 0.002%
< 0.004%
< 0.009%
< 0.017%
< 0.034%
< 0.068%
< 0.137%
< 0.274%
< 0.548%
(Colors chosen with Color Brewer.)

The map is colored by annual "confirmed cases" as reported by the CDC (csv) divided by the Census estimate of the 2012 population (csv) with mild weighting for recency. This isn't quite right, since population hasn't stayed constant over the last 20 years, but it should be pretty close.

If you want to know what the incidence is in a particular county, you can look it up in lyme_risk_by_county.csv.

Code is on github.

(This 2009 flowing data post was very useful.)

Referenced in: Peekskill Lyme Incidence

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

Look! A therapy technique people don't already know!

via Thing of Things May 14, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

Impact, agency, and taste

understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking

via benkuhn.net April 19, 2025

more     (via openring)