Mapping U.S. Covid-19  Cases Near You

By Cedric Sam and David Ingold
Updated:

Few areas of the U.S. have been spared a recent surge in the Covid-19 outbreak, as daily new case counts routinely exceed 100,000 across the U.S. and the number of hospitalizations nears totals not seen since the early days of the pandemic.

State-level reporting of cases and deaths brush over how rapidly the virus spread through communities, with staggering numbers in some locales as people spread the virus across state lines, often unknowingly, as they socialized, worked or commuted. Examining the country through the more localized communities Americans interact with on a daily basis—roughly defined here as a 2-hour drive from each county seat—it becomes clear where spikes in new cases are steepest and where the death toll is currently rising.

New cases per million
  • 0–25
  • 25–50
  • 50–100
  • 100–200
  • 200–500
  • 500–1000
  • 1,000–2,000
  • 2,000 or more
Daily deaths per million
  • 0–0.5
  • 0.5–1
  • 1–2
  • 2–3
  • 3–5
  • 5–10
  • 10–20
  • 20–40
  • 40 or more

Vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. have shown promising preliminary results. But even still, cases are projected to increase into the winter as cold temperatures return to parts of the country, forcing people to stay indoors where the virus more easily spreads.

Editors: Yue Qiu and Alex Tribou
With the assistance of: Andre Tartar
Sources and methodology

County case and death data used in this analysis is published by The New York Times.

Daily new Covid-19 cases and deaths are shown as a seven-day rolling average. Cases that were not assigned to a county (assigned statewide instead) have been discarded in these averages, making them potentially lower than actual readings. Some case numbers display as negative when the daily differences are negative. These may be due to methodological changes, sometimes with dramatic effect, such as in Massachusetts on Sept. 2. The use of a rolling average helps in smoothing out some of those discrepancies. Although territories of the U.S. are not available on this map, the national figures include them.

To calculate the two-hour driving distance from each county or county equivalent to another, we used the county seat when available (data from Department of Transportation’s Populated Places database) and queried Mapbox’s Matrix API to determine the driving time between any given county seat with neighboring ones.

In a small number of counties or county equivalents with multiple seats or none, the most populous or historically representative city was selected. Some Alaskan county equivalents are not connected to the statewide road system, therefore making it impossible to calculate their neighbors within a 2-hour drive.

Population figures used to calculate cases per capita came from the U.S. Census Bureau for states, D.C. and Puerto Rico and were as of July 1, 2019. For American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the figures came from the CIA World Factbook and were as of July 2020.

Cases and deaths in the “rest of the country” subtract a selected region’s numbers from the U.S. total, which also covers figures not assigned a county and territories.