We just published some updates to our coronavirus tracker maps. Here’s a quick thread on what we changed and why. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

First, we updated the color scale that we’ve been using for months. The outbreak has become so bad in parts of the country that our old scale no longer showed any variation in severity—everything was just solid red.

Our new scale adds buckets up to 250 new cases per 100,000 people each week. That will let you to see a more detailed picture of how bad things are across the country.

We also removed the population filter from the map. We originally decided not to shade sparsely populated places in order to avoid overstating the size of small outbreaks in the West when cases were concentrated in the Northeast.

But now, coronavirus cases have been detected in nearly every county in the United States. We think removing the population filter makes it easier to see the spatial distribution of the virus and understand how it’s impacting your region.

We just passed 250,000 deaths in the United States and many places in the country are experiencing their worst outbreaks yet. We hope these changes will help you make sense of what's going on and we always welcome feedback on ways we can make our pages better!

Just want to clarify that "everything was solid red" in the earlier tweet was referring to the hardest hit counties that our new scale provides more detail for—not literally every county.

For comparison, here's the old scale and new scale side by side.