13 ms·

Mapping Coronavirus, Responsibly

681 points by three14 7y ago

inferiorhuman 7y ago
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.
smacktoward 7y ago
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.")
- ubertakter 7y ago
  It seems like you are complaining about graphics in the article, but I'm not sure. If you read the article, it specifically talks about why those are not good visualizations and gives pointers on developing good ones. For the 3D one specifically, right under the graphic, the article says: "3D has a time and a place. It can be a really useful way to encode thematic data on the z-axis and make something useful. But extruding Hubei compared to the rest of the areas just doesn’t work. It’s gratuitous and adds nothing. It’s really hard to make any sense of relative amounts and that’s before we even deal with foreshortening and occlusion."
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    I read the article, thank you. It's you who have misread my comment. I was praising the article for illustrating good principles of visual communication, and lamenting how there are so many people making data visualizations out there that don't understand this stuff. P.S. From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith... Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
    - codetrotter 7y ago
      As someone who read your comment before reading the article, I took your comment to mean that the article was poor because it had bad graphics. That's not a criticism against you on my part btw, only an observation. So it might be that more people read your comment that same way due to how you phrased it.
      - blattimwind 7y ago
        The article has bad graphics. The question whether GGGP criticizes the article or not is only resolvable if you know both the comment and the article. If you do, the answer is quite obvious. If not, it is hard to predict. A wonderful example of entropy.
    - bobwaycott 7y ago
      > ... lamenting how there are so many people making data visualizations out there that don't understand this stuff. This point was clear in your top comment. > I was praising the article for illustrating good principles of visual communication... This point was completely unclear in your top comment. I read your top comment three times, and each time made me feel more certain you were complaining about the site as an example of failing to implement good visualizations (until I read this comment).
    - ubertakter 7y ago
      Hence my first sentence, "It seems like you are complaining about graphics in the article, but I'm not sure." First you said, "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." I was and am 100% on board with this comment. I think the same thing often. Then you said "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." I agree, the article does a pretty good job. Then, "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." I was uncertain about this statement. The previous sentence you start by stating "There's just so few good examples..." and end with "...like the ones outline in this article", which made it a little unclear if the one's in the article were good or not, but as I was reading it I was leaning to the good side. Then this sentence started with "They generally seem...", and since the end of the previous sentence ended talking about the "ones outlined in the article", I associated "They" with "the ones in the article". And this sentence that started with "They generally" was negative. Then I contributed some miscommunication. When I used "you" in the sentence I was thinking in general terms (including myself) and not you personally. I think that might have been better stated as "If one reads the article...". Anyway, I was initially confused by your statement. Now I see what you were going for. Edits: grammar, missing words
- taeric 7y ago
  Map visualizations are the worst. The xkcd in how they are typically just population maps...
  - EForEndeavour 7y ago
    Maps are often abused or misused, but I'd be curious to know why you believe map viz in general to be the worst. Done responsibly, they can and often are extremely insightful, serving purposes that no other viz can. The fact that most maps are terrible means we need to encourage better maps, not dismiss them entirely.
    - taeric 7y ago
      That argument can be used for any visualization. Used correctly, they are usually good. That said, I am being dramatic on my claim. It doesn't help that I don't have an internal map. I'm oddly good with directions, but I do not visualize getting from here to there in anything resembling a map in my mind. So, to that end, most maps that someone uses to show me something that it is best at, a simple time series or scatter plot would have done as well. Often better. That is to say, selection bias on my part. ;)
  - kps 7y ago
    xkcd 1138, not to be confused with THX 1138.
  - flukus 7y ago
    My pet peeve is electoral maps, they show some interesting trends but there overuse make us seem a lot more divided on geographic lines than we actually are.
- bitxbit 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
- piffey 7y ago
  I loved this look back on data visualization from The Economist. You might as well. https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368 https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8...
- catacombs 7y ago
  > read an Edward Tufte book to them Tufte, as another user correctly pointed out, is massively overrated. He is also incredibly thin-skinned and often blocks people, many of whom work in data visualization, if they criticize or critique his work or ideas. Alberto Cairo is just as overrated, but he is more receptive to feedback.
  - alanh 7y ago
    See my rebuttal to that other comment. And please elevate your discussion from the realm of feelings about people. Let’s say he is thin-skinned. So? That doesn’t change how helpful and eye-opening his delightful books are.
perennate 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - komali2 7y ago
    Within your goals to keep HN as clean as you have (incredibly) done, this makes sense. I don't know how to reconcile your goals with another person's rejection of any kind of normalization of Chinese threatening of Taiwanese sovereignty. Perhaps the only option is for those unwilling to let articles get away with glossing over Taiwanese sovereignty unchallenged to get banned / downvoted to oblivion. I think that's acceptable, though sad, because I like it here.
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
crmrc114 7y ago
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.
user5994461 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
    - owl57 7y ago
      Not the GP, but have protanopia. FEFE62 > D35BF7 > 005AB5 > DC3220 ≈ default.
    - arkades 7y ago
      Same as owl57, "FEFE62 > D35BF7 > 005AB5 > DC3220 ≈ default."
- JoshTko 7y ago
  Thanks for making this. When you are zoomed out at the world level it's hard to differentiate UK with a few cases vs. Italy which has 300+ cases.
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  Very helpful! I was just looking for this. Thank you
danso 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - danso 7y ago
    I guess I'm having a hard time thinking of reasons why absolute value is more important than rate, especially in this scenario, when we're measuring the impact of an infectious disease that spreads person-to-person. I suppose in the hypothetical situation, where there are 10,000 cases in Wyoming and 10,000 cases in New Jersey. A choropleth map by rate would shade Wyoming 15-18 times darker than New Jersey. And this would obfuscate the likely reality that 10,000 cases in New Jersey is imminently a far bigger story – because N.J. is not only 15-18 times more populous, but ~25 times more dense. (The fact that Wyoming is ~15x bigger by land mass would make the issue worse, in terms of visual distraction) But I'm not sure how shading this by absolute totals – in which case, Wyoming and N.J. would be the same shade – would provide significantly more value? Sure, N.J.'s situation wouldn't be effectively invisible in the totals map, compared to the rates map. But now we have to imagine a scenario in which a person-to-person virus managed to sicken so many people (proportionally speaking) in such a large rural state compared to an extremely urban state. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which we don't want to focus attention on Wyoming. For 10,000 Wyoming people to be infected – and only 10,000 affected in New Jersey – would almost certainly mean that the infection's original epicenter is Wyoming, and that someone from Wyoming had direct contact via travel with a New Jersey resident, (especially if Wyoming and N.J. are outliers in terms of absolute totals by state).
panic 7y ago
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.
Grue3 7y ago
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.
- danso 7y ago
  I initially thought the same thing, but revised my thinking after I kept reading. I made a comment here [0], but the author is correct that in this case (as in almost every conceivable visualization case), mapping the cases-per-person value is necessary. The mapping of absolute counts almost completely hides the severity of the impact in Hubei province, and how the severity in other provinces has a direct relationship to their geographic distance from Hubei. > These political divisions are arbitrary anyway. Not sure how interstate activity and travel is regulated/limited in China (in normal times), but in the U.S., state borders are not just some imaginary political construct. Laws and services – and therefore, impact to respective populations – can drastically differ by state lines, and ignoring that is a huge mistake. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436842
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    I think what they mean by the political divisions being arbitrary is that you could use a different division system, for example city boundaries instead of province, and have something completely different, with even more contrast in densities.
- mikedilger 7y ago
  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.
PeterStuer 7y ago
I am using https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... as an 'at a glance' overview
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  I'm trying to figure out which projection they're using for this, any idea?
  - nwallin 7y ago
    It's definitely some variety of Mercator. It's probably Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere, which is the default for most Esri projects.
  - PeterStuer 7y ago
    It is the Web Mercator projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection
xwowsersx 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    These are good ideas. Thanks for your reply.
- pwg 7y ago
  HN thread from yesterday on this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425593
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  US CDC: - Wash your hands. - Cover your cough. - Stay home. (Last: if you're sick, if the outbreak is local, if you don't absolutely need to be somewhere.) Ready: Pandemic preparations: Community mitigation guidelines to prevent pandemic influenza https://www.ready.gov/pandemic https://www.ready.gov/pandemic Before a Pandemic - Store a two week supply of water and food. - Periodically check your regular prescription drugs to ensure a continuous supply in your home. - Have any nonprescription drugs and other health supplies on hand, including pain relievers, stomach remedies, cough and cold medicines, anti-diarrhoeal medication, fluids with electrolytes, and vitamins. - Get copies and maintain electronic versions of health records from doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and other sources and store them, for personal reference. - Talk with family members, loved ones, neighbours, co-workers, and other frequent contacts, about how they would be cared for if they got sick, or what will be needed to care for them in your home. During a Pandemic Limit the Spread of Germs and Prevent Infection: - Avoid close contact with people who are sick. - When you are sick, keep your distance from others to protect them from getting sick too. - Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing. It may prevent those around you from getting sick. - Wash your hands frequently to help protect you from germs. - Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. - Practice other good health habits. Get plenty of sleep, be physically active, manage your stress, drink plenty of fluids, and eat nutritious food. Adapted from: <https://www.ready.gov/pandemic> https://www.ready.gov/pandemic> (Most of the prepatory advice will be familiar to Bay Area residents as typical earthquake preparedness. Elsewhere it's standard preparation for major winter storms or hurricanes. Be prepared to sit tight for a few weeks.) US CDC medical travel advisories: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices United States, 2017, Draws on ~200 journal articles written 1990 - 2016. Provides a framework on response strategy to COVID-19. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm)
yorwba 7y ago
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?province=hubei https://news.sina.cn/project/fy2020/yq_province.shtml?provin... Their visualization isn't great, but someone else could use their data to do a better job.)
- heartbeats 7y ago
  It seems like the heat map can be useful there, as long as you divide it by population count.
daveslash 7y ago
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/
Eliezer 7y ago
For this application I think you really want one of those maps that equalizes area and population!
ska 7y ago
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.
alanh 7y ago
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 7y ago
  We should have just called it SARS 2
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    It seems that the medical community is converging on SARS-CoV-2, which is pretty close to your suggestion.
    - alanh 7y ago
      Oops. That’s what I meant
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mantap 7y ago
  The specific type of coronavirus is clear from context. Language would be very tiresome if we had to give a full taxonomy for every term we use. For instances I say "I saw a fox outside my house yesterday". I don't need to specify the exact species of fox, and anybody who knows that I live in Europe will know that I mean vulpes vulpes.
Waterluvian 7y ago
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.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... [2] https://imgur.com/NPhEzk7 https://imgur.com/NPhEzk7
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  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.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Thanks, yeah I used the wrong term.
  - bilekas 7y ago
    > equal-population cartogram Ah my previous comment was looking for this!
  - slavik81 7y ago
at_a_remove 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
lawrenceyan 7y ago
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?
- evanlivingston 7y ago
  There are at least 7 cases in the bay area. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Wuhan-coronavirus-Here-s-what-we-know-15000563.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Wuhan-coronaviru...
- moultano 7y ago
  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-in-this-graph-feb-26-2020.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/learning/whats-going-on-i... 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 7y ago
    Then why is the article author downplaying it so substantially?
    - moultano 7y ago
      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 7y ago
thedance 7y ago
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.
Thorentis 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
heartbeats 7y ago
>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.
btomtom5 7y ago
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.
- croddin 7y ago
  Yes but the New York numbers are for a year, the Hubei numbers are for about 2 months and are increasing.
- three_seagrass 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Great point. Thanks for correcting me.
- paxys 7y ago
  What is the expected rate of growth of murders in NYC?
namirez 7y ago
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?s=20 https://twitter.com/ARTICLE19Iran/status/1231895623789576192...
- bilekas 7y ago
  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.
bilekas 7y ago
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.
Aeolun 7y ago
Even if people knew this, they’d still use red and make a heatmap. Gotta get those pageviews. I really like the article though.
tzvsi 7y ago
Ok, I have doubts. You can literally put ", Responsibly" behind anything and it sounds legit. Google, Responsibly Facebook, Responsibly AirBNB, Responsibly Prove me wrong.
justlexi93 7y ago
It is scary knowing that the number of cases increases.
aeontech 7y ago
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/
ggm 7y ago
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?
tidenly 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Whoa. What's that about? Taiwan is shown as if it's transitioned to Chinese control.
  - tidenly 7y ago
    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..
deleted 7y ago
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pnako 7y ago
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-Epi-Data.html https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-manual/chapters/Describing...
eliben 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  > only ~110 out of every 100,000 got infected I don't think they have done any random sampling in the testing. If you only have mild symptoms (could be it or something else) it's best to stay home rather than risk catching it at the hospital.
microcolonel 7y ago
> 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.
c3534l 7y ago
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.
peteretep 7y ago
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-population-cartogram-of-europe-in-2018europe-is-home-to-711-million-pe/1508438995952871/ https://m.facebook.com/457568574373257/posts/this-is-a-popul...
ohmyblock 7y ago
Is there a map with the exact location (cities) of outbreaks covering Europe? I can only find Country based maps
tasogare 7y ago
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.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  Yeah, it's even casually listed in the bar chart as a "Chinese province".
- sleepytimetea 7y ago
  That is a BIG problem with this article - it looks like Chinese efforts to infiltrate all maps with their idea of Taiwan are pervasive and this author has unwittingly used their version of map data.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
sanguy 7y ago
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.
gchokov 7y ago
Excellent visualizations on Bloomberg - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-wuhan-novel-coronavirus-outbreak/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-wuhan-novel-coronavi...
- paulirish 7y ago
  Erm, the bucketting used in their maps also has the same problems the article discusses.
mkj 7y ago
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?

681 points by three14 7y ago

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.

smacktoward 7y ago

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.")

ubertakter 7y ago
It seems like you are complaining about graphics in the article, but I'm not sure. If you read the article, it specifically talks about why those are not good visualizations and gives pointers on developing good ones. For the 3D one specifically, right under the graphic, the article says: "3D has a time and a place. It can be a really useful way to encode thematic data on the z-axis and make something useful. But extruding Hubei compared to the rest of the areas just doesn’t work. It’s gratuitous and adds nothing. It’s really hard to make any sense of relative amounts and that’s before we even deal with foreshortening and occlusion."
- smacktoward 7y ago
  I read the article, thank you. It's you who have misread my comment. I was praising the article for illustrating good principles of visual communication, and lamenting how there are so many people making data visualizations out there that don't understand this stuff. P.S. From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith... Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    As someone who read your comment before reading the article, I took your comment to mean that the article was poor because it had bad graphics. That's not a criticism against you on my part btw, only an observation. So it might be that more people read your comment that same way due to how you phrased it.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      The article has bad graphics. The question whether GGGP criticizes the article or not is only resolvable if you know both the comment and the article. If you do, the answer is quite obvious. If not, it is hard to predict. A wonderful example of entropy.
  - bobwaycott 7y ago
    > ... lamenting how there are so many people making data visualizations out there that don't understand this stuff. This point was clear in your top comment. > I was praising the article for illustrating good principles of visual communication... This point was completely unclear in your top comment. I read your top comment three times, and each time made me feel more certain you were complaining about the site as an example of failing to implement good visualizations (until I read this comment).
  - ubertakter 7y ago
    Hence my first sentence, "It seems like you are complaining about graphics in the article, but I'm not sure." First you said, "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." I was and am 100% on board with this comment. I think the same thing often. Then you said "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." I agree, the article does a pretty good job. Then, "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." I was uncertain about this statement. The previous sentence you start by stating "There's just so few good examples..." and end with "...like the ones outline in this article", which made it a little unclear if the one's in the article were good or not, but as I was reading it I was leaning to the good side. Then this sentence started with "They generally seem...", and since the end of the previous sentence ended talking about the "ones outlined in the article", I associated "They" with "the ones in the article". And this sentence that started with "They generally" was negative. Then I contributed some miscommunication. When I used "you" in the sentence I was thinking in general terms (including myself) and not you personally. I think that might have been better stated as "If one reads the article...". Anyway, I was initially confused by your statement. Now I see what you were going for. Edits: grammar, missing words
taeric 7y ago
Map visualizations are the worst. The xkcd in how they are typically just population maps...
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Maps are often abused or misused, but I'd be curious to know why you believe map viz in general to be the worst. Done responsibly, they can and often are extremely insightful, serving purposes that no other viz can. The fact that most maps are terrible means we need to encourage better maps, not dismiss them entirely.
  - taeric 7y ago
    That argument can be used for any visualization. Used correctly, they are usually good. That said, I am being dramatic on my claim. It doesn't help that I don't have an internal map. I'm oddly good with directions, but I do not visualize getting from here to there in anything resembling a map in my mind. So, to that end, most maps that someone uses to show me something that it is best at, a simple time series or scatter plot would have done as well. Often better. That is to say, selection bias on my part. ;)
- kps 7y ago
  xkcd 1138, not to be confused with THX 1138.
- flukus 7y ago
  My pet peeve is electoral maps, they show some interesting trends but there overuse make us seem a lot more divided on geographic lines than we actually are.
bitxbit 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
piffey 7y ago
I loved this look back on data visualization from The Economist. You might as well. https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368 https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8...
catacombs 7y ago
> read an Edward Tufte book to them Tufte, as another user correctly pointed out, is massively overrated. He is also incredibly thin-skinned and often blocks people, many of whom work in data visualization, if they criticize or critique his work or ideas. Alberto Cairo is just as overrated, but he is more receptive to feedback.
- alanh 7y ago
  See my rebuttal to that other comment. And please elevate your discussion from the realm of feelings about people. Let’s say he is thin-skinned. So? That doesn’t change how helpful and eye-opening his delightful books are.

perennate 7y ago

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 7y ago
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&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- komali2 7y ago
  Within your goals to keep HN as clean as you have (incredibly) done, this makes sense. I don't know how to reconcile your goals with another person's rejection of any kind of normalization of Chinese threatening of Taiwanese sovereignty. Perhaps the only option is for those unwilling to let articles get away with glossing over Taiwanese sovereignty unchallenged to get banned / downvoted to oblivion. I think that's acceptable, though sad, because I like it here.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

crmrc114 7y ago

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.

user5994461 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
  - owl57 7y ago
    Not the GP, but have protanopia. FEFE62 > D35BF7 > 005AB5 > DC3220 ≈ default.
  - arkades 7y ago
    Same as owl57, "FEFE62 > D35BF7 > 005AB5 > DC3220 ≈ default."
JoshTko 7y ago
Thanks for making this. When you are zoomed out at the world level it's hard to differentiate UK with a few cases vs. Italy which has 300+ cases.
s1artibartfast 7y ago
Very helpful! I was just looking for this. Thank you

danso 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- danso 7y ago
  I guess I'm having a hard time thinking of reasons why absolute value is more important than rate, especially in this scenario, when we're measuring the impact of an infectious disease that spreads person-to-person. I suppose in the hypothetical situation, where there are 10,000 cases in Wyoming and 10,000 cases in New Jersey. A choropleth map by rate would shade Wyoming 15-18 times darker than New Jersey. And this would obfuscate the likely reality that 10,000 cases in New Jersey is imminently a far bigger story – because N.J. is not only 15-18 times more populous, but ~25 times more dense. (The fact that Wyoming is ~15x bigger by land mass would make the issue worse, in terms of visual distraction) But I'm not sure how shading this by absolute totals – in which case, Wyoming and N.J. would be the same shade – would provide significantly more value? Sure, N.J.'s situation wouldn't be effectively invisible in the totals map, compared to the rates map. But now we have to imagine a scenario in which a person-to-person virus managed to sicken so many people (proportionally speaking) in such a large rural state compared to an extremely urban state. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which we don't want to focus attention on Wyoming. For 10,000 Wyoming people to be infected – and only 10,000 affected in New Jersey – would almost certainly mean that the infection's original epicenter is Wyoming, and that someone from Wyoming had direct contact via travel with a New Jersey resident, (especially if Wyoming and N.J. are outliers in terms of absolute totals by state).

panic 7y ago

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.

Grue3 7y ago

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.

danso 7y ago
I initially thought the same thing, but revised my thinking after I kept reading. I made a comment here [0], but the author is correct that in this case (as in almost every conceivable visualization case), mapping the cases-per-person value is necessary. The mapping of absolute counts almost completely hides the severity of the impact in Hubei province, and how the severity in other provinces has a direct relationship to their geographic distance from Hubei. > These political divisions are arbitrary anyway. Not sure how interstate activity and travel is regulated/limited in China (in normal times), but in the U.S., state borders are not just some imaginary political construct. Laws and services – and therefore, impact to respective populations – can drastically differ by state lines, and ignoring that is a huge mistake. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436842
- jobigoud 7y ago
  I think what they mean by the political divisions being arbitrary is that you could use a different division system, for example city boundaries instead of province, and have something completely different, with even more contrast in densities.
mikedilger 7y ago
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.

PeterStuer 7y ago

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

TurkishPoptart 7y ago
I'm trying to figure out which projection they're using for this, any idea?
- nwallin 7y ago
  It's definitely some variety of Mercator. It's probably Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere, which is the default for most Esri projects.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  It is the Web Mercator projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection

xwowsersx 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  These are good ideas. Thanks for your reply.
pwg 7y ago
HN thread from yesterday on this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425593
dredmorbius 7y ago
US CDC: - Wash your hands. - Cover your cough. - Stay home. (Last: if you're sick, if the outbreak is local, if you don't absolutely need to be somewhere.) Ready: Pandemic preparations: Community mitigation guidelines to prevent pandemic influenza https://www.ready.gov/pandemic https://www.ready.gov/pandemic Before a Pandemic - Store a two week supply of water and food. - Periodically check your regular prescription drugs to ensure a continuous supply in your home. - Have any nonprescription drugs and other health supplies on hand, including pain relievers, stomach remedies, cough and cold medicines, anti-diarrhoeal medication, fluids with electrolytes, and vitamins. - Get copies and maintain electronic versions of health records from doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and other sources and store them, for personal reference. - Talk with family members, loved ones, neighbours, co-workers, and other frequent contacts, about how they would be cared for if they got sick, or what will be needed to care for them in your home. During a Pandemic Limit the Spread of Germs and Prevent Infection: - Avoid close contact with people who are sick. - When you are sick, keep your distance from others to protect them from getting sick too. - Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing. It may prevent those around you from getting sick. - Wash your hands frequently to help protect you from germs. - Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. - Practice other good health habits. Get plenty of sleep, be physically active, manage your stress, drink plenty of fluids, and eat nutritious food. Adapted from: <https://www.ready.gov/pandemic> https://www.ready.gov/pandemic> (Most of the prepatory advice will be familiar to Bay Area residents as typical earthquake preparedness. Elsewhere it's standard preparation for major winter storms or hurricanes. Be prepared to sit tight for a few weeks.) US CDC medical travel advisories: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices United States, 2017, Draws on ~200 journal articles written 1990 - 2016. Provides a framework on response strategy to COVID-19. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm)

yorwba 7y ago

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?province=hubei https://news.sina.cn/project/fy2020/yq_province.shtml?provin... Their visualization isn't great, but someone else could use their data to do a better job.)

heartbeats 7y ago
It seems like the heat map can be useful there, as long as you divide it by population count.

daveslash 7y ago

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/

Eliezer 7y ago

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

ska 7y ago

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.

alanh 7y ago

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 7y ago
We should have just called it SARS 2
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  It seems that the medical community is converging on SARS-CoV-2, which is pretty close to your suggestion.
  - alanh 7y ago
    Oops. That’s what I meant
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mantap 7y ago
The specific type of coronavirus is clear from context. Language would be very tiresome if we had to give a full taxonomy for every term we use. For instances I say "I saw a fox outside my house yesterday". I don't need to specify the exact species of fox, and anybody who knows that I live in Europe will know that I mean vulpes vulpes.

Waterluvian 7y ago

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.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... [2] https://imgur.com/NPhEzk7 https://imgur.com/NPhEzk7

Mathnerd314 7y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Thanks, yeah I used the wrong term.
- bilekas 7y ago
  > equal-population cartogram Ah my previous comment was looking for this!
- slavik81 7y ago

at_a_remove 7y ago

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 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

lawrenceyan 7y ago

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?

evanlivingston 7y ago
There are at least 7 cases in the bay area. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Wuhan-coronavirus-Here-s-what-we-know-15000563.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Wuhan-coronaviru...
moultano 7y ago
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-in-this-graph-feb-26-2020.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/learning/whats-going-on-i... 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 7y ago
  Then why is the article author downplaying it so substantially?
  - moultano 7y ago
    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 7y ago

thedance 7y ago

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.

Thorentis 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

heartbeats 7y ago

>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.

btomtom5 7y ago

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.

croddin 7y ago
Yes but the New York numbers are for a year, the Hubei numbers are for about 2 months and are increasing.
three_seagrass 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Great point. Thanks for correcting me.
paxys 7y ago
What is the expected rate of growth of murders in NYC?

namirez 7y ago

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?s=20 https://twitter.com/ARTICLE19Iran/status/1231895623789576192...

bilekas 7y ago
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.

bilekas 7y ago

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.

Aeolun 7y ago

Even if people knew this, they’d still use red and make a heatmap. Gotta get those pageviews. I really like the article though.

tzvsi 7y ago

Ok, I have doubts. You can literally put ", Responsibly" behind anything and it sounds legit. Google, Responsibly Facebook, Responsibly AirBNB, Responsibly Prove me wrong.

justlexi93 7y ago

It is scary knowing that the number of cases increases.

aeontech 7y ago

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/

ggm 7y ago

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?

tidenly 7y ago

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 7y ago
Whoa. What's that about? Taiwan is shown as if it's transitioned to Chinese control.
- tidenly 7y ago
  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..

deleted 7y ago

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pnako 7y ago

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

eliben 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
jobigoud 7y ago
> only ~110 out of every 100,000 got infected I don't think they have done any random sampling in the testing. If you only have mild symptoms (could be it or something else) it's best to stay home rather than risk catching it at the hospital.

microcolonel 7y ago

> 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.

c3534l 7y ago

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.

peteretep 7y ago

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

ohmyblock 7y ago

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

tasogare 7y ago

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.

jobigoud 7y ago
Yeah, it's even casually listed in the bar chart as a "Chinese province".
sleepytimetea 7y ago
That is a BIG problem with this article - it looks like Chinese efforts to infiltrate all maps with their idea of Taiwan are pervasive and this author has unwittingly used their version of map data.
bagacrap 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

sanguy 7y ago

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.

gchokov 7y ago

Excellent visualizations on Bloomberg - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-wuhan-novel-coronavirus-outbreak/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-wuhan-novel-coronavi...

paulirish 7y ago
Erm, the bucketting used in their maps also has the same problems the article discusses.

mkj 7y ago

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?