Covid Buckets

These four maps use exactly the same data; the difference is in how the data is categorized.  It's the same concept of how to lie with statistics; it's how to lie with maps.

Here are the 4 options:

Equal intervals:  the range of death rate is divided into equal buckets

Quantiles:  the number of observations is divided equally among the 5 buckets, each of which has 20% of all the counties

Natural Breaks:  observations are broken into buckets used statistics to identify how the data can best be broken into chunks.

Finally, Standard Deviation shows which counties were above or below the mean by county.

Conclusions:

This last one is the most informative; where were death rates extra high or especially low.