Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Tracking Ebola throughout West Africa
Photo by DANIEL BEREHULAK / REDUX PICTURES
My teacher, Jonathan Soma, has been working with Caitlin Rivers, a grad student in computational epidemiology at the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at Virginia Tech, who has been spearheading the collection and cleansing of Ebola statistics to be used by media outlets for reporting purposes. The data can be found here: https://github.com/jsoma/ebola/tree/master/aggregate_data and here: https://github.com/cmrivers/ebola.
This map of Africa serves to show the region I am focusing on in my data analysis (highlighted in pink).
The darker the red, the more confirmed cases there are of Ebola in the area.
I have also been working with D3 to produce some interactive Ebola maps but due to the limitations of WordPress.com I am unable to embed them into the page here. Here are screenshots of the maps created and to see the interactive components, simply click on the images to be redirected to a website where they can be viewed.
This chart demonstrates how the cases of Ebola in Liberia are almost parallel to the number of confirmed cases that there have been. This is an alarming statistics because it shows that when one contracts Ebola in Liberia, you are almost guaranteed to die from the infection.
As seen in the chart below, the number of deaths and cases has been steadily increasing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most interestingly, however, there is a large disparity between laboratory confirmed cases of Ebola and the number of registered cases. Because the number of deaths is higher than the number of laboratory confirmed cases, it is clear that there are cases not being recorded of Ebola that are still killing people.
Robyn Spector Media 