Coronavirus cases have been growing rapidly in the United States, from only around 100 positive tests across the entire country on March 4 to over 5,000 less than two weeks later.
Some of that growth is because testing has become much more available. But the disease itself also poses an enormous threat, holding the potential to overwhelm our health care system.
Using data from the COVID Tracking Project, see how positive and total test results have grown across the country since March 4.
A San Josè-based community center for people recovering from mental illnesses, addiction, and homelessness offers culinary and barista training classes for some members. While the program may seem to be focused on getting participants jobs, job training is secondary to helping participants gain confidence and coping mechanisms — skills that many people in recovery struggle to obtain.
I visited the cafè several times and wrote, filmed, and edited a profile about the job training classes. (I used Adobe Premiere Pro for the editing.)
After our local hospital system announced it was cutting obstetric services from one of its hospitals, I wanted to know what impact the decision would have on the amount of time women would have to spend traveling to deliver a baby. I calculated the travel times to the nearest obstetric unit from each ZIP code in our region using Google Maps's API in Python and mapped the results using QGIS.
The change, I found, would mean that more women in our region would have to drive long distances -- with some having to travel close to an hour -- to deliver a baby at a hospital with a devoted obstetric unit.
A doctor in Front Royal, Virginia set up a GoFundMe page to help pay for his bone marrow biopses — a sign, I wrote, of how expensive cancer treatment is in the United States.