The World Needs More Coronavirus Maps
This is my fourth article about building interactive maps to visualize COVID-19 spreading. I’m writing it regarding an update to the initial map we rolled out about a month ago. The new version consists of four maps instead of just one.
Our latest version of the product shows:
- Total number of confirmed cases in each country relatively to population
- Number of deaths relatively to number of cases (#1)
- Number of recovered people per each 100k cases (#1)
- Number of active cases relatively to population
A country gets a proper colouring (and opacity) depending of so-called density of each parameter: orange — for distribution, burgundy—for death cases, green—for recoveries and plum—for active cases.
Why Is It Important
Total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in a country is not a representative parameter to be considered for geographic overview. Some countries do not provide/collect correct data, some conduct fewer tests and all of them are different in territory and population density.
But, what if we compare total number of confirmed cases with population in each country. That may persumably show us regions with abnormal COVID-19 results.
Furthermore, fatalities and recovered people are better to analyze relatively to total number of confirmed cases in a country instead of total population.
World Population
To make it work we decided to use World Population Prospects by UN Population Division. The source provides estimates for almost all countries till 2030. However, that data needs a minor update: UN still counts Kosovo population inside Serbia. So I used the data published by CIA.
Download a copy of World Population data based on UN estimates for 2020 and CIA data here.
Four Maps
You may browse Russian version of our project at currenttime.tv website. English version may be found here. For convenience, screenshots below are from our English website.
Docker container with a Python app and GeoJSON for the whole World is available on github.
