Epidemics and pandemics in maps – the case of COVID-19

Abstract

Epidemics and pandemics are geographical in nature and constitute spatial, temporal, and thematic phenomena across large ranges of scales: local infections with a global spread; short-term decisions by governments and institutions with long-term effects; and diverse effects of the disease on many aspects of our lives. Pandemics pose particular challenges to their visual representation by cartographic means. This article briefly summarizes some of these challenges and outlines ways to approach these. We discuss how to use the information usually available for telling the story of an epidemic, illustrated by the example of the 2019-2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The maps attached to this article demonstrate the discussed cartographic means.

Revealing Public Opinion Towards COVID-19 Vaccines With Twitter Data in the United States: Spatiotemporal Perspective

“…Third, different states demonstrated various trends in sentimental and emotional scores. Our geospatial analysis and map visualization [ 53 ] better portray more aspects of users’ attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines. This helps identify the areas with high negative sentimental and emotional scores that require further research to understand the public's underlying fears and concerns about COVID-19 vaccines.…”

Exploratory study on the spatial relationship between emerging infectious diseases and urban characteristics: Cases from Korea

“…This topic has mainly been approached from a medical perspective and attends to the descriptive characteristics of infectious agents and pathways ( Hoang, Hoang, Khuong, La, & Tran, 2020 ; Lee et al, 2020 ). Some case studies have been conducted on COVID-19 that evaluate environmental factors such as temperature, precipitation, and population density ( Byass, 2020 ), link reduction and deindustrialization characteristics ( Krzysztofik, Kantor-Pietraga, & Spórna, 2020 ), and identify spatial characteristics with mapping and spatial analysis ( Dejardins, Hohl, & Delmelle, 2020 ; Mocnik, Raposo, Feringa, Kraak, & Köbben, 2020 ). However, these studies focus on the descriptive patterns of COVID-19 but do not take into account the relationship between existing and new infectious diseases and the factors of infectious disease related to urban characteristics.…”

Mapping and Counter-Mapping COVID-19: From Crisis to Cartocracy

“…Long-standing initiatives such as the British Cartographic Society's Better Mapping campaign have aimed to educate those working with geospatial data in order to improve standards in cartographic quality, and attempts to illustrate specific methods for mapping COVID-19 have been offered (e.g. Field, 2020;Mocnik et al, 2020), urging makers of would-be-viral virus maps to demonstrate a commitment to communicating both effectively and responsibly.…”