The color shows the infection rate (e.g. 1 person in 100) as indicated by the legend. Even though the infection rates vary greatly between states, I used the same scale for easier comparison.
I normalized things with respect to population because I think that shows the impact the best. I would assume that healthcare capacity increases roughly linearly with the population. Thus, when there is a high number of people newly infected per capita the healthcare systems in those counties/states are likely very strained.
I averaged over a seven day period to smooth things because the rate at which data gets updated for some counties is much larger than one day. I felt one week was a good averaging period to get a better estimate of how things are changing.
I will try to keep these updated daily for the foreseeable future.
The data I use is collected by The NY Times and published on GitHub at: https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.
Average daily new infections per capita by state.