As another commenter pointed out, geographic projections are well-known in the infoviz literature to be problematic, for a number of reasons. Further, two dime

As another commenter pointed out, geographic projections are well-known in the infoviz literature to be problematic, for a number of reasons. Further, two dimensional area (circles) is a particularly terrible dimension to marry to geography, because it’s an additional (and therefore competing) spatial dimension. Color is better, but still has problems (compare Rhode Island to Texas, or populous New Jersey to unpopulated Wyoming/Alaska). And color forces you to bin, which can be misleading. Chloropleths are still harder to read (compare California to Maine, they don’t share an Axis and are irregular shapes, making it hard to compare their areas) than a bar graph or histogram. IMO a logarithmic bar graph is the most reasonable choice, if you want to include population density I’d encode it with opacity and one-dimensional space (a shaded-in bar representing infection, a dark bar representing mortality, and a transparent bar representing total population). If geographic projections are that important to you, you can superimpose those bars on countries. It sucks but it gives you geographic scale. If anyone wants to build this graph, please include an adjacent, different-hued bar encoding the number of tests performed thus far.