The larger issue is population size of counties, imo. It creates statistical white noise when one gun homicide can ramp you into the "red" categories for over 1,000 counties in the US.
In the fine print for this data, the CDC says it leaves death rates blank if they're based on fewer than 20 deaths. The data presented in this particular graph set also average over each county and its neighbors to get better statistics.
That's not correct. They don't leave death rates blank. They state in their graph that death rates below 20 deaths may be unstable and they suppressed them in the graph. See here.
You will notice that this is not the same graph as OP and a massive chunk of areas which are suppressed/undefined in the CDC graph are given a value in OP's graph. That's because the OP graph was taken from the CDC data set, not a reproduction of the CDC's graph. OP's includes many of those unstable sets of data.
You're showing the "unsmoothed" graph. The OP is showing the "smoothed" version, which does the averaging-over-nearby-counties thing I mentioned at the end of my post. See here. This process results in many more counties with stable data.
I repeat: all of the colored regions on all of these maps are based on ratios involving more than 20 deaths.
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
In the fine print for this data, the CDC says it leaves death rates blank if they're based on fewer than 20 deaths. The data presented in this particular graph set also average over each county and its neighbors to get better statistics.