Mapping COVID-19 Spread
By: Rhiannon Killian, PhD, GISc
Amongst the throng of unread emails with a COVID-19 subject line, my glazed eye brightens at the treasures – online COVID-19 maps and data charts. Having seen the geospatial light after a career in biomedical research, the frequently updated clearly and creatively displayed or time-animated COVID-19 web dashboards speak to me in ways words or numbers on a page cannot. Thus a fair fraction of my societally mandated social distancing time thus far has been spent harvesting map links from various geospatial email threads. I am going to bet what has come to me doesn’t even scratch the surface of the wonderful maps out there on the web. Here are some of the most interesting map-based resources I’ve found so far.
Worldwide
Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases Dashboard (Johns Hopkins University) – Although not the best of the current offerings, it was one of the earliest. It is a regularly updated global data dashboard with maps and charts.
Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Situation Dashboard (World Health Organization) – ditto.
COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard (University of Virginia) – Dashboard with time animation enabled map, cumulative and daily charts, and a sortable and searchable data table.
COVID-19 Cases and Clusters Outside of Mainland China Dashboard (University of Virginia) – Dashboard including a map, charts on travel history, patient age, symptoms and sortable table with links to data sources.
Global Confirmed COVID-19 Cases and Spread Dashboard (OmniSci) – Excellent dashboard with cross-filterable maps, charts, tables and statistics on country-by-country cases, mortality and recovery rates, and total and daily infections.
Genomic epidemiology of novel coronavirus website (Nextstrain) – Phylogeny tree tracking genetic evolution of the virus family, details of specific genetic changes among the variants and a lovely time animation map showing the spread outward from China.
United States
U.S. Spread of COVID-19 Maps (SharedGeo) – Time animation maps showing (1) total cases per day county-by-county and (2) doubling time of the number of cases state-by-state.
COVID-19 State Level Geospatial Resources Map (National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation) – a gateway map to U.S. state COVID-19 geospatial resources and websites.
While compiling my own list of coronavirus treasure maps, I found a trove compiled by Joe Francica. And if you still want more, you can always Google it, but beware: hackers have used look alike COVID-19 maps to entice users to download malware.
Keep checking back for more updates – stay safe!
