3.8. covid19_create_region

This CLI is designed to create a custom geographical region, consisting of multiple counties, in a single state or US territory.

It has an associated CLI front-end, covid19_region_updates, that creates the latest COVID-19 summary of that region. Its help output, when running covid19_create_region -h, is the following,

usage: covid19_create_region [-h] -c [COUNTIES [COUNTIES ...]] -s STATE -p PREFIX -n NAME

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c [COUNTIES [COUNTIES ...]], --counties [COUNTIES [COUNTIES ...]]
                        List of counties (all in a single state) out of which to create a geographical region.
  -s STATE, --state STATE
                        The single state from which to create a geographical region.
  -p PREFIX, --prefix PREFIX
                        The prefix of the geographical region. Must be a single word.
  -n NAME, --name NAME  Name of the geographical region.

Given a list of counties, the state, and the name of the geographical region, it spits out a JSON region file that covid19_region_updates can understand. Here are what the separate flags mean:

  • -c or --counties specify the separate counties in this region.

  • -s of --state specifies the state in which these counties reside.

  • -p or --prefix is the prefix name of the underlying JSON file.

Best to show-by-example, where I am creating the Blue Ridge Health District (consisting of six counties) geographical region like so,

covid19_create_region \
  -c Charlottesville Albemarle Nelson Greene Louisa Fluvanna \
  -s Virginia -p brhd \
  -n "Blue Ridge Health District"

Here’s the flow of the CLI with confirmation prompt.

It prompts for whether the list of counties look acceptable. If you chose y to the list of counties, this creates a geographical region file, brhd.json.

{
 "prefix": "brhd",
 "region name": "Blue Ridge Health District",
 "fips": [
  "51003",
  "51065",
  "51079",
  "51109",
  "51125",
  "51540"
 ],
 "population": 218615
}

This should look pretty similar to the Python dictionary of geographical data for St. Louis I show in create_and_store_msas_and_fips_2019. In the brhd.json dictionary are keys for the prefix, the region name, fips is a list of FIPS codes for its six counties, and population is its census-d population.