All data shown is pulled from Cook County Medical Examiner (CCME) records released through the Cook County Data Portal. We check for new death records hourly, though CCME generally releases new data twice a day. We have included death records with COVID-19 listed as a primary or secondary cause. Neighborhood counts have been calculated from latitudes and longitudes attached to death records. These locations reflect CCME's determination of where the person fell ill. In most cases, it is their home address. CCME also reports that when a person detained at Cook County Jail dies, their location is recorded as the jail's address in Little Village.

Keeping data on race is always complicated, and the pie chart above should be taken with a grain of salt. CCME includes a value for race in most death records, and an additional flag for Latino that can be true or false. For this project, we are including any record where Latino is true exclusively in the Latinx category.

As part of this live tracker we are also keeping records of changes made to CCME data over time in order to create an archive of when death records are created and modified. All code running this site is open source here.