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We issued a correction to our ZIP code lookup tool: Suburban Cook County was misidentified as all of Cook County. Thanks to long-time Chicago civic data nerd @joshkalov for catching it! https://www.chicagoreporter.com/how-is-covid-19-affecting-your-zip-code-in-illinois/
While it's never fun to make a mistake, there are over 1,000 ZIP codes, 103 counties, and the data from the state doesn't line up perfectly with any of them. We simply won't catch everything, and the state's data can be volatile and unpredictable on a day-to-day basis.
We account for this properly in all our prior graphics, but I had an uncaught bug in my code to handle it for the ZIP code lookup when I generated our geographic data.
That's why working in the open and getting feedback like this is so helpful. My *first story* at NPR I had to issue a similar relatively minor correction, and oddly enough explaining the correction and how @ryanpitts saw the mistake in our code was more popular than 1st promo.
