
Mapping Coronavirus, Responsibly - three14
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/mapping/mapping-coronavirus-responsibly/
======
Waterluvian
As someone with too many GIS degrees, I feel a level of cathartic release in
reading this and thinking that laypersons might be able to improve their map
making skills, avoiding some of the more serious cartographic gotchas. It was
well-written. The beauty of the ubiquity and greatly-improved UX of modern GIS
tools is that everyone can dive in to doing geospatial analysis and building
static and dynamic maps. It also means people can accidentally author very
misleading visualizations.

Despite this ESRI-backed article on the subject, I think the popular ESRI-
driven map dashboard for Coronavirus[1] has a major flaw that violates the
crux of this article. Dot density maps _MUST_ be set to scale relative to your
map scale, or else you get nightmare scenarios like this one[2]. This is
doubly true if the dots are varying in size (which I also think is a
fundamentally terrible representation, because people suck at mentally
comparing areas). If I were to modify it, I would probably use a choropleth-
like representation. Keep the dots equally sized and colour them different
shades of red. That way nobody's brain will mislead them into thinking "this
larger circle means a larger area is all infected."

[1]
[https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

[2] [https://imgur.com/NPhEzk7](https://imgur.com/NPhEzk7)

~~~
Mathnerd314
Personally I'd use an equal-population cartogram like [https://go-
cart.io/cartogram](https://go-cart.io/cartogram) instead of a geographic
projection, and a dot map or solid colors based on density.

And per the terminology in the article, that ESRI map uses proportionally
scaled symbols, not dots.

~~~
slavik81
That equal population map looks decent enough for the US, but it's pretty poor
for Canada. Arbitrary political boundaries vastly distort the size of regions.
Northern Alberta, for example, is barely more populated than the Northwest
Territories. However, southern Alberta has a bunch of people, so northern
Alberta is huge while the North West Territories are squished flat.

That pattern holds true for nearly every province, making them all rather
misleading.

------
smacktoward
I can't count the number of times I've looked at a data visualization and
wished I could sit down with the person who made it and read an Edward Tufte
book to them. There's just so few good examples out there of data
visualizations that respect basic principles of visual communication, like the
ones outlined in this article. They generally seem to aim more for visual
_impact_ (like the useless 3D display in the article, which you've gotta admit
is striking) than for _clarity_ , which I guess is understandable but is still
too bad.

(And as long as I'm griping, don't get me started on all the people who think
a wall of text slapped into a PNG constitutes an "infographic.")

~~~
bitxbit
I think Tufte is very overrated. People who are reasonably comfortable with
data rather have it in basic format. Tufte-style often takes a lot of effort
to produce and the payoff isn’t there. Consultants love it though because they
can bill their clients for playing around for hours with charts.

~~~
braythwayt
Where Tufte (and others like him) is concerned, I try to remember the maxim
_Do not follow in the footsteps of the sages. Seek what they sought._

Slavishly reproducing his methodology ignores everything we've learned since
then. On the other hand, for those new to the field, reading about his work
and understanding what he was trying to accomplish with the tools available at
the time can open our eyes to new ways of thinking.

(As an aside, this same maxim has also helped me with things like programming
tools. We don't need to use Lisp or Smalltalk for everything, but we can learn
a lot from these languages, and especially from what their creators and
proponents were trying to achieve with them.)

~~~
ghaff
Furthermore, there are different styles for different purposes.

The famous graphic about Napoleon's army which is very associated with Tufte
is an example of a graphic that crams a lot of data into an illustration that
rewards careful study. It's actually not a graphic that especially makes data
about something obvious at a quick glance.

Sometimes an illustration that best serves as a background for a knowledgeable
person spending 30 minutes explaining it is a good approach. Other times you
want to capture the contrast between a few numbers in a compelling way.

~~~
ticmasta
I have and admire this graphic and I think it highlights a few top-level
things you mention like the right representation for the right audience. It
takes some time and concentration to understand the Napoleon graphic vs. a
simpler presentation where a few key points jumping out at you with ease, but
that it manages to encode so many dimensions into a 2-d format is where it is
unique. Tufte generally pushes information density over other, equally as
valid, goals.

~~~
ghaff
I also like to point to this graphic that was originally used in a New York
Times article about the failings of Powerpoint:

[http://sdwise.com/2013/07/hey-new-york-times-a-causal-
loop-d...](http://sdwise.com/2013/07/hey-new-york-times-a-causal-loop-diagram-
is-not-a-powerpoint-fail/)

But, as the linked article discusses, this is actually a really good diagram
if you have someone up there explaining it in extreme detail. But it looks
like a mockable graphic to the casual observer.

------
danso
Very nice and well-written writeup. Here's one graf that randomly provoked
some thoughts:

> _But looks can be deceptive. The fact that it looks okay is hiding a dark
> secret that, if you’re not aware of the fact, won’t even get noticed. The
> map is using totals (absolute values). There are very very few golden rules
> in cartography but this is one of them: you cannot map totals using a
> choropleth thematic mapping technique. The reason is simple. Each of our
> areas on the map is a different size, and has a different number of people
> in it. These two innate characteristics of all thematic maps means you
> simply cannot compare like for like across the map._

> _The label tells us that Hubei region has over 65,000 cases of coronavirus.
> It sounds a lot. But does Hubei have 100,000 people, or possibly 100,000,000
> people living there?_

I definitely agree with the author: that there are very few "golden rules" in
visualization, and that _not_ depicting absolute numbers in a choropleth map
is one of them. However, the author does an excellent job (with a bar chart
and revised map) showing how this anti-pattern _severely_ obfuscates how much
the Hubei region is an extreme outlier.

~~~
platz
I can see why people might be mislead, but absolute value is a very
understandable metric.

If you start moving to things like per-capita, i actually think that has the
potential to be more confusing for more numbers of people.

so yes, absolute values will be highly correlated with population, but again
it just depends on what you really want to highlight and communicate

Maybe you really do want the absolute value.

~~~
luckylion
> Maybe you really do want the absolute value.

What for though? What can you tell from that value, other than the value
itself?

You cannot tell whether it's common or rare, you cannot tell the risk of
anyone in a certain area to be affected, you will have a hard time showing
trends because people will react to the phenomena and avoid a certain high-
risk area which will then result in fewer cases in that area.

~~~
hackinthebochs
When the presence of the contagion is the risk, absolute numbers communicate a
lot. Relative counts are less meaningful right now.

The majority of meaningful information received from such a chart right now is
the presence or absence of the virus. Secondary is the number of cases to
indicate the stage of spread (e.g. 1 suggests maybe an outlier, 2-10 suggests
early stages of contact spreading, etc).

Communicating information with an inherently exponential growth rate is just
entirely different beast.

~~~
danso
Why is "has province reported any cases?" the most meaningful information?
Ignoring the current reality of every province having reported cases since
January, a simple boolean shading would obfuscate nearly every vital insight
realistically conceivable. If it were the case that 3 months after the Hubei
outbreak, Hubei had 100,000 reported cases, and all bordering provinces had
1-100, that is an extremely important distinction to make when assessing the
effectiveness of containment policies (and/or the trustworthiness of official
government numbers).

~~~
hackinthebochs
I agree with what you're saying about reporting cases in China. My point was
in the context of reporting elsewhere in the world where most areas have zero
cases and so having cases or not is the most important information, followed
by the number of cases. I should have been clearer.

------
at_a_remove
The difficulty I always thrash around with is: proportional by area or
proportional by population? I used to do some crime maps and some areas would
look quite crime-ridden ... because they were areas with very little
population, as the census counts it, like parks and such, so the crime would
look rather high. So dividing by population isn't the cure-all, but it beats
nothing. For giggles, I would do crimes in a given region, crimes in a region
divided by that area, and crimes in a region divided by the population in that
region. Very different-looking results.

I have often considered dividing by some kind of combination of area _and_
population, but even that seems not quite right. Disregarding "victimless
crimes," much crime is interactive: two or more parties must be involved,
therefore the population ought to have some kind of exponent attached to it,
like particles bouncing against one another in a container.

I never did puzzle this out, I am sure brighter minds than I would have come
to some conclusions.

~~~
heartbeats
>therefore the population ought to have some kind of exponent attached to it,
like particles bouncing against one another in a container.

Population squared? That gives you the number of potential connections.

~~~
at_a_remove
That was my first thought, yes, but then I think area ought to be involved
somewhere; if the area is large enough, even a medium population will not have
people ("particles") interacting ("colliding") as often.

In the rather clumsy taxonomy of crime I created from the UCR, most violent
crime -- excepting suicide -- would be collision-based. Some drug crimes like
possession would not be collision-based (although it could be argued that
possession involves buying which involves another person) while drug sales
would be. Crimes against property are interesting -- is that another person by
proxy, or should that merely be collision-less?

~~~
c_hawkthorne
What about something like property crimes/100,000 people and violent
crimes/100,000 people? Disease rates are often reported in such ways like in
the article posted the best map had rates/100,000 and not strictly population
or area.

------
Grue3
The number of cases per people statistic is silly. It might make sense when
the virus is common around the world, but when it's just spreading the number
of cases itself is more important. For example if you detected 100 people
infected with a virus in some region, does it matter if it has 200 million
people (Uttar Pradesh) or 10 million (Lombardy)? These political divisions are
arbitrary anyway.

~~~
mikedilger
I concur. If you are concerned about catching it during your travels, people
who don't have it are just as irrelevant as the number of automobiles who
don't have it; thus, cases per people is just as irrelevant as cases per
(people + automobiles).

You should be concerned about the fraction of land area on which you are at
high risk. If 100 people have it, and each person creates a high risk across A
area (and the areas don't overlap), that is 100*A / country-area. Which is
proportional to cases/area (presuming A is constant) the first statistic he
used.

EDIT: if you know you are going to interact with N people, the cases per
population figure is relevant again.

~~~
viraptor
> presuming A is constant

It's that the case anywhere? Even city centre / suburbs will have different
values, much less a whole province where A may contain an empty field or a
group of residential buildings with 50 floors and shared lifts.

I could see how it would be useful for a map of a city, or maybe even at a
scale of some regions... but not for comparing totals between regions.

------
namirez
This is interesting but sadly their service is not accessible in Iran, one of
the hardest hit countries by Covid-19, not due to censorship by the Iranian
government, but due to server-side blocking of IP addresses originating from
Iran. The reason: US sanctions!

[https://twitter.com/ARTICLE19Iran/status/1231895623789576192...](https://twitter.com/ARTICLE19Iran/status/1231895623789576192?s=20)

~~~
bilekas
Email me if you need a rehost in EU - We can do a stream of the content from
JH and feed it through, it might be ~2 seconds behind but if you guys are
stuck for info it might be better than nothing.

------
yorwba
Also worth considering whether you really need to aggregate all cases in the
same province. If you can get higher-resolution data, use it. (E.g. for each
prefecture in Hubei province:
[https://news.sina.cn/project/fy2020/yq_province.shtml?provin...](https://news.sina.cn/project/fy2020/yq_province.shtml?province=hubei)
Their visualization isn't great, but someone else could use their data to do a
better job.)

~~~
heartbeats
It seems like the heat map can be useful there, as long as you divide it by
population count.

------
tasogare
OP wants to give lesson about mapping yet include Taiwan in a map of China.
Seriously? He should learn about geography and country borders first before
writing any blog post.

~~~
bagacrap
How about something constructive? Please write an uncontroversial blog post
explaining "country borders". It should be easy since there's never once been
disagreement on the subject in all of human history.

~~~
tasogare
How about opening Wikipedia and reading about the subject? I don't owe you any
explanation. There is no ambiguity or "disagreement" (except on the Chinese
side) on the matter: the fact is Taiwan has never ever been under the
sovereignty of the People's Republic of China, period. The preceding entity
that had both control over mainland China and Taiwan was the Republic of
China, which is now ruling Taiwan.

If for you the fact that a country emits internationally valid passports,
print its money, has a government and an army is not enough to be a real
state, you're a living in a province of China too.

------
panic
I actually love the 3D map despite how cheesy it is. It shows how much of an
outlier Hubei is better than any of the 2D maps do.

------
peteretep
A map seems a terrible base layer for any information that isn’t trying to
show proximity or proportional landmass. Seems ridiculous to mess around with
talking about a projection when it’s still showing provinces related to their
shape and size, which is worthless information here. Why not just use a
population cartogram as the base?

[https://m.facebook.com/457568574373257/posts/this-is-a-
popul...](https://m.facebook.com/457568574373257/posts/this-is-a-population-
cartogram-of-europe-in-2018europe-is-home-to-711-million-pe/1508438995952871/)

------
ggm
If we get 1+ in Alaska and Greenland, for most peoples immediate visual sense
"OMG OMG OMG look how much of the map is now .. red"

Because Mercator.

Likewise in soviet russa.. map owns you. How much of the cold war might have
been put back to bed, by a better map projection?

------
thedance
If anyone from Esri ever reads these comments, please for the love of maps
stop using scroll wheel and pinch to move maps north-south. Nobody, literally
nobody, has ever wanted that, literally never.

------
bilekas
I was thinking today that it would be a good use of that map data thats
recorded from our phones GPS for mapping the route of the virus.

Hypothetically: If all infected submitted their map data for the last few days
(annonymously - no need to identify people) and all of that data was plotted
over maps, you could identify the routes and direction of infections.

I don't know if it would be anything more than an interesting visualisation of
the data already collected, but the comment mentioning Edward Tufte really got
me thinking how to visualise the data we have properly.

We haven't seen something spreading like this in my lifetime anyway and at the
same time, we've never had so much data on ourselves in my lifetime either,
might be a good time to put it to good use for once.

------
user5994461
Incidentally, I made a demo app with proportionally sized circles like they
suggest, and it allows to move day-by-day to see the progression.
[https://coronaprogress.com/](https://coronaprogress.com/)

I am gonna update the numbers for today.

~~~
arkades
Could you allow the viewer to select the color of the case indicator? Or maybe
just add a contrasting outline on the circles? I'm a not-at-all-uncommon type
of colorblind, and I find it very, very difficult to make out red dots on
green satellite image.

~~~
user5994461
Try these. Which one(s) can you distinguish better?

[https://coronaprogress.com/?color=FEFE62](https://coronaprogress.com/?color=FEFE62)

[https://coronaprogress.com/?color=D35BF7](https://coronaprogress.com/?color=D35BF7)

[https://coronaprogress.com/?color=DC3220](https://coronaprogress.com/?color=DC3220)

[https://coronaprogress.com/?color=005AB5](https://coronaprogress.com/?color=005AB5)

~~~
arkades
Same as owl57, "FEFE62 > D35BF7 > 005AB5 > DC3220 ≈ default."

------
alanh
I wish people would stop treating “coronavirus” and COVID-19 (or SARS-CoV-19)
as synonyms. They are not. There are many more coronaviruses.

~~~
hackinthebochs
We should have just called it SARS 2

~~~
s1artibartfast
It seems that the medical community is converging on SARS-CoV-2, which is
pretty close to your suggestion.

~~~
alanh
Oops. That’s what I meant

------
pnako
The CDC has its own recommendations (written by an actual epidemiologist),
which don't seem to be the same as those "responsible" recommendations

[https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-
manual/chapters/Describing...](https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-
manual/chapters/Describing-Epi-Data.html)

------
aeontech
Does anyone know if a GLEAMviz [0] model for Covid-19 is in the works?

There's a H1N1 model here [1] that one could use as a starting point, I
imagine?

[0] [http://www.gleamviz.org](http://www.gleamviz.org)

[1]
[http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/models/](http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/models/)

------
ohmyblock
Is there a map with the exact location (cities) of outbreaks covering Europe?
I can only find Country based maps

------
xwowsersx
I'm unclear as to whether we should be seriously concerned about Coronavirus
in the US at this point. Are there preparations I should be making or
precautions I should be taking? People have been WhatsApping me articles about
face mask shortages, but I don't know if this is just scaremongering.

~~~
aaomidi
Be as prepared as if you were living in the bay area and were preparing for an
earthquake.

There's nothing to really say the same situation happening in China, Iran, SK,
Italy won't happen here.

Have a supply of food ready, minimize being in crowds, don't touch your face
when you're not inside the house.

Other stuff I've been doing that aren't necessarily the right thing:

\- Eating meat well done for a while

\- Not eating raw veggies

\- Working from home more often

\- Telling sick co-workers to stay home (I'm in a tech company, theres really
no excuse of sick days)

~~~
xwowsersx
These are good ideas. Thanks for your reply.

------
Eliezer
For this application I think you really want one of those maps that equalizes
area and population!

------
lawrenceyan
As someone living here in the Bay Area, I have little to no interaction with
the current ongoing Coronavirus outbreak. Why are Asian countries taking such
dramatic measures right now?

To be willing to take on such an economic drain in order to do so makes it
seem like they're treating the virus like a potential pandemic. Are the death
rates for the current coronavirus outbreak substantially higher than the
regular flu? What else am I missing here?

~~~
moultano
Yes, the death rates are somewhere around 20x higher, and it is much more
transmissable. The nytimes has a great graph showing the range of possible
values for death rate and transmissability of the virus as compared to other
historical viruses. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/learning/whats-going-
on-i...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-
graph-feb-26-2020.html)

My only quibble is that the shape of the uncertainty shouldn't be a box, it
should be oriented around a downward sloping line.

~~~
jimmaswell
Then why is the article author downplaying it so substantially?

~~~
moultano
This isn't the best article, it appears to be a student activity guide. I was
just intending to link to the graphic that has appeared throughout the
nytimes' coverage.

~~~
jimmaswell
I meant the OP article.

~~~
ska
How does the article downplay it? It's about how not to misrepresent the data.

~~~
jimmaswell
"Red is too alarming, we should use blue" doesn't reconcile with the severity
of the situation as far as I can tell.

~~~
ska
I don't think that is an accurate characterization at all, what they were
saying about color choice was more nuanced and allowed that things might get
much worse. Why start with the most evocative "danger" mapping when there are
a lot of unknowns?

------
heartbeats
>We’re mapping a human health tragedy that may get way worse before it
subsides. Do we really want the map to be screaming bright red? Red [...] can
connotates [sic] danger, and death, which is still statistically extremely
rare for coronavirus.

This really seems like a case of "it's not a bug, it's a feature". It may be
rare (so far, anyway), but few would argue "danger and death" is an inaccurate
characterization.

------
eliben
What caught my eye is that in Hubei province, which we all imagine as a zombie
apocalypse now, only ~110 out of every 100,000 got infected, and at this point
the new infection rate is going down.

Which is quite amazing, given that the virus was spreading there for weeks (at
least) without anyone being aware of anything before all the mess was
uncovered and announced.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
I would hope the rate is decreasing if everyone has been forcefully
quarantined for almost a month!

If growth was still exponential under these conditions, we would be very very
screwed.

------
daveslash
If you enjoyed this post, then I'd _really_ recommend _" The Wall Street
Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data,
Facts, and Figures"_ by Donna Wong.
[http://www.donawong.com/](http://www.donawong.com/)

------
Aeolun
Even if people knew this, they’d still use red and make a heatmap. Gotta get
those pageviews.

I really like the article though.

------
PeterStuer
I am using
[https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)
as an 'at a glance' overview

~~~
TurkishPoptart
I'm trying to figure out which projection they're using for this, any idea?

~~~
PeterStuer
It is the Web Mercator projection
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection)

------
gchokov
Excellent visualizations on Bloomberg -
[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-wuhan-novel-
coronavi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-wuhan-novel-coronavirus-
outbreak/)

~~~
paulirish
Erm, the bucketting used in their maps also has the same problems the article
discusses.

------
inferiorhuman
Thanks for posting this, and not just because it's immediately relevant. ESRI
goes over some really good guidelines for visualizations as well as
interpreting them that can be applied to anything you see in e.g. the New York
Times.

------
mkj
A proportional symbol map doesn't seem very useful. It's meant to scale by
area of the symbol, but at least personally I find myself comparing the
diameter of the symbol.

Maybe thick 2d lines would work better?

------
crmrc114
Its funny that for a software company ESRI basically owns the GIS market. I
really liked how this article goes over processing a projection and
communicating reality w/o panic and sky is falling insanity.

------
sanguy
This is ironic from ESRI. Nothing they do is responsible - but all they do is
for domination and control of the industry.

Jack would happily watch people die if it sold more licenses.

------
c3534l
I'm not convinced the 3D map isn't the most illustrative and compelling graph
of them all. It says way more than the sprinkle of hard-to-parse dots does.

------
Thorentis
In what data visualisation situation would you use anything other than an area
equal map? What advantage does the web projection offer over area equal?

~~~
nwallin
Conformal map projections are important for navigation. Equal area projections
can be conformal over small areas, but not over large areas.

Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere is a good default for a software application to
use. It is global, meaning that regardless of what data you dump onto it, it
will show up on the map. It is conformal, which means if you zoom in, shapes
will be preserved. If you zoom in on a town square that is actually square, it
will be square on the map, too. North is up in all locations.

That being said, it's only a good default because if you users aren't
knowledgeable enough to select the right projection, web Mercator aux sphere
is the least bad, lowest common denominator option. When you as a user choose
what projection to use to visualize your data, it's usually wrong to select
web Mercator aux sphere. But if you were never going to make the effort to
select the right projection anyway, it's not a completely terrible default.

Note that web Mercator is different from web Mercator aux sphere. Web Mercator
is not conformal, which makes it pretty useless. Many people use the terms web
Mercator and web Mercator aux sphere interchangeably, which they shouldn't.

------
btomtom5
As a point of reference for how deadly the corona virus is, you are more
likely to die by murder in New York city than you are to die by corona virus
in Hubei, assuming a death rate of 2.5 percent. The murder rate in NYC is 5
per 100K whereas the infection rate in Hubei is 111 per 100K.

Edit: This isn't really a fair assessment. See the comments below.

~~~
three_seagrass
The infection rate is still unknown, so spreading misinformation like this is
not helpful.

It took just 1 person to infect 600 people on a 2,700 passenger cruise ship,
many of which happened even after quarantine and medical staff were
introduced.

That means that 1.9 million NYC people can be infected and 38,000 people can
be killed from just one person.

~~~
btomtom5
Great point. Thanks for correcting me.

------
microcolonel
> _It can easily connotate danger, and death, which is still statistically
> extremely rare for coronavirus._

No, no, no. 2.2% (conservatively) is not _extremely rare_ for a virus that we
have been helpless to stop from spreading to every continent except
Antarctica.

------
tidenly
Really interesting article. Ironically, though, an article about mapping
responsibly is using a map of China with Taiwan on it.. That's a pretty huge
oversight.

Edit: Downvote all you like guys - but Taiwan is an independent nation. :)

~~~
themodelplumber
Whoa. What's that about? Taiwan is shown as if it's transitioned to Chinese
control.

~~~
tidenly
Lots of people in the west unfortunately don't know or care about the
situation and just grab whatever map of "China" they can find on google
images, unaware its got another country in it.

What's odd though is the author even plotted data for Taiwan, so they must
have seen what they were doing..

------
perennate
The article raises several good points, but inexplicably includes Taiwan in a
map of coronavirus in China. Might as well include North/South Korea as well.

~~~
dang
Please let's not go off topic into that one. A plausible interpretation is
that someone made a mistake. Even if it wasn't a mistake, there's no new
information here that could support a discussion, so we'd end up with a
generic Taiwan/China flamewar. Such threads are bad because they're repetitive
and predictable, and of course get nasty.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
AlchemistCamp
It's not off topic. Millions of people live in Taiwan, including yours truly.

Taiwan's exclusion from the WHO and other geo-political bullying
notwithstanding, the situation regarding this outbreak is dramatically
different here than it is in China.

The impacts of travel restrictions on people who have recently visited Taiwan
are also dramatically different than those who have recently visited China.

~~~
07d046
Indeed, it is not off topic when the topic is "Mapping Coronavirus,
Responsibly."

One practical implication of grouping Taiwan with China is that Italy banned
travel from Taiwan along with China, even though the situation in Taiwan is
basically fine.

It's also not plausible that the author, a professional cartographer, just
made a mistake about Taiwan.

~~~
hker
> One practical implication of grouping Taiwan with China is that Italy banned
> travel from Taiwan along with China, even though the situation in Taiwan is
> basically fine.

It is interesting that Russia acted differently from Italy: to ban travel from
China but not from Taiwan.

------
ska
Good data visualization is hard, and most mapped data that isn't geographical
in nature is poorly done (cue xkcd cartoon).

Some of the point in this discussion are pretty good, but the thing I missed
is a good commentary on the temporal nature of anything like virus spread.

------
justlexi93
It is scary knowing that the number of cases increases.

------
tzvsi
Ok, I have doubts. You can literally put ", Responsibly" behind anything and
it sounds legit.

Google, Responsibly Facebook, Responsibly AirBNB, Responsibly

Prove me wrong.

