On Monday, Dec. 6, The Rural Blog excerpted an NPR story headlined, "A county's vote for Trump is predictive of its Covid-19 vaccination rate, and more generally of its death rate." It was accompanied by two plotter charts on which the vaccination and death rate of each county were on the vertical axis and its percentage of vote for Trump on the horizontal axis. We used one county as an example, to show how local news media could give their audiences a sense of their place in the phenomenon.
The U.S. has 3,243 counties and county equivalents, so the dots on that pair of plotter charts are two fuzzy clouds, not clear trend patterns. Readers, especially rural ones, want to know how their county relates to other counties in their state, especially those close to them. We now know that is possible, through state-by-state graphs created by web designer Charles Gaba, who put them into the public domain by publishing them on Twitter; here are the vaccination graphs.; here are the death graphs.
Above and below are two examples. In those giving data for states with lots of counties, such as Kentucky (below), some counties may be difficult to discern. But counties' data are easily available. To enlarge or download either image, click on it.
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