The State of Illinois map of COVID vaccination sites is pretty bad. 

Screenshot of the Illinois Department of Public Health map, taken February 14, 2021.

It’s slow (caused my browser tab to crash after a couple minutes), has misspelled county and city names, missing ZIP code digits, and cannot be searched by address. There are duplicate entries, too.

I made a new version of the state’s COVID vaccination sites map.

I didn’t make any COVID maps earlier because I didn’t want to spend the time to ensure that I understood the right and wrong ways to map disease, because people make decisions based on maps and I don’t want my maps to end up harming anyone. 

The new map of COVID vaccination sites on Chicago Cityscape.

Aside from the state website’s usability issues, I’m very disappointed that there is zero data about COVID in the state’s #opendata portal.

These cities and counties have the most COVID vaccination sites, according to the IDPH’s dataset. 

For the top 10 or so, it seems to correlate with population. Except Skokie has 7 sites, and Evanston has 4, despite Evanston having 10,000 more residents. Nearly 100% of Illinois is within 60 minutes driving of the current COVID vaccination sites. (More are coming, at least in Chicago.) 

Nearly 100% of Illinois is within 60 minutes driving of the current COVID vaccination sites. (More are coming, at least in Chicago.)

And a lot of Illinois is still within 45 minutes driving of the current COVID vaccination sites. Really big gaps in geography appear at the 30 minutes driving threshold.

A map of Illinois showing 30 minute driving areas around each of the 862 COVID vaccination sites.

I’m working with some people to show access via transit. This is super important. I predict that upwards of 75 percent of Chicagoans will be able to access a vaccination site or two within 45 minutes and 100 percent within 60 minutes.

Here’s another shortcoming of the state’s map: Each site’s unique ID is not persistent, making it difficult to compare one day’s list to the following day’s list. I got around that by making a “hash” of each vaccination site and comparing between two versions.

The map has been updated once since I started. The “hash” creates a unique ID based on the attributes of each vaccination site (name, address, city, county, ZIP code). Any time one of those attributes changes, the hash will also change and thus I can more easily find new or modified vaccination sites.