For several days now, the New York City Department of Education’s COVID-19 case map has had a significant error: on this dashboard, a number of schools are erroneously located in Colombia. Like, the South American country.
The error appears to be a problem with the dashboard’s geographical tagging, putting these schools in another continent instead of their correct NYC neighborhoods. But it’s a pretty big issue for parents and school staff who might be checking the map, looking for COVID-19 cases at their schools.
If these users didn’t know to zoom out and then scroll down a fair amount—which they probably wouldn’t, unless they got very creative or followed the right people on Twitter—they would think there were no cases. Which is far from the truth.
Shout-out to NYC schools data experts Mary Ann Blau and Sarah Allen for flagging this issue!