Today, the national debt of the United States of America stands at an eye-watering 28 trillion dollars and rising. The CARES Act of 2020 and other stimulus bills due to COVID have added massive increases in a short period of time. To see how we got to this place to being with Visual Capitalist has this great interactive timeline of US debt over the past 150 years.

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Starting in the year 1900 only 4.8% of the total national debt was held by the public. After World War I in 1910 that percentage jumped to 10. In 1920 following the Great Depression that number doubled to 22.9%. Ten years later that number would be in the billions, 16 billion to be exact with President Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1930. World War II would see this number jump to 40 billion or 75.1% of the GDP. The Korean War of 1950 would add hundreds of billions to the debt clock in only ten years bringing the total in 1950 to $257 billion but bringing the GDP down to 56.8%. The next big increase would come in 1980 when president Reagan introduced his tax cuts causing the gross debt to jump to over 900 billion. Ten years later it would see another massive jump to over $3,233 billion dollars with the Gulf War. Thirty years later the COVID-19 pandemic caused the average debt held by the public to sky rocket to 105.6 percent in 2020 , over $27,748 billion dollars. By 2050 it is estimated that the percentage of debt held by the public will be almost 200 percent.

When it comes to royal and aristocratic families throughout Europe, you might be surprised to learn that many of these families (even those that are ruling countries hundreds of miles apart) share numerous common ancestors. This amazing interactive visualization from Nadieh Bremer lets you navigate through these outrageously interconnected family trees. She has done the painstakingly delicate work of laying out all of these ancestral connections in a way that allows you to connect familial relationships over a one thousand year period.

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This incredible interactive chart begins at the start of the 11th century and consists of thousands of colored dots, that each represent a person, that can be clicked on to reveal connections to others who came both before and after them. At the top of the chart is ten of the current monarchs and leaders of royal families in Europe. Each and every one of them can be tied back to ancestors that they have in common.

In the days before much was known about incest, royal families would marry off young men and women to cousins, aunts, uncles, and even siblings. Queen Elizabeth II is even related to her late husband, Prince Philip; they’re 3rd cousins! There are many different reasons why royals married within their own clan. These included increasing territory and power, creating stronger family ties, and so on. What they didn’t know then is that inbreeding can lead to some serious genetic disorders. Hydrocephaly and Habsburg jaw were just two of the common disorders that can be attributed to inbreeding. Ferdinand I of Austria had both. Blood disorders like hemophilia also wreaked havoc in royal families, and has even led to the end of empires.

COVID has taken the last year and a half of our lives hostage. There isn’t a day that goes by where you don’t hear someone say, “COVID-19” or, “pandemic”. Today, most TV or radio news has shifted to focus on the COVID-19 vaccine.

Scientists agree that the only way out of this pandemic is to vaccinate a high percentage of the population to achieve herd immunity. The exact numbers required for herd immunity varies depending on who you ask but it believed to be in the percentage rage of 75% to 85%. Vaccines began distribution in the United States in early December and since then, over 266 million vaccine doses have been administered in the general population. These interactive visualizations from NPR.org is updated regularly to show how the vaccine rollout is moving throughout the US.

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There are five different graphs that organize and display the data from the CDC. The first graph uses a U.S. hexagon heatmap. The different shades represent how much of a state’s population is vaccinated. You can toggle between fully vaccinated and those that have received the first dose to see how each state is progressing.

The second graph is a bar chart that shows how many doses have been given, per day, in the US since December 15th. The highest day was April 1st when 4,284,392 doses were administered. Unfortunately, vaccination numbers have trending downward since then.

The third graph down shows a projected chart of when the majority of people in each state will be fully vaccinated. Rhode Island is in the lead projecting 85% of the entire state to be vaccinated by July 10th, 2021. Mississippi is the last state projected to have 85% of the population vaccinated but not until December of 2022. These projections change on a daily basis based on each state’s weekly vaccination rate.

The forth visual is a bubble chart (specifically a clustered force layout) which represents which states lead the race to get their population vaccinated as well as the state’s population size. Maine currently leads the race with 48.7 of their population fully vaccinated.

The final section on the page is a table showing how the vaccine rollout is going in each state. You can toggle between vaccination rates by age (percent of those over 18 and those over 65) as well as the percentage of doses used by each state. Now that vaccinations have been approved for people 12 years and older, this table will likely need to be updated to include those new numbers.