Mapping the global spatio-temporal dynamics of COVID-19 outbreak using cartograms during the first 150 days of the pandemic

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a public health emergency of international concern that caused disaster consequences all over the world. To mitigate and manage the pandemic, geographical information systems (GIS)-based spatial analysis has been used in a key role. To this aim, many GIS-based maps are produced by many national and international institutions. However, the produced maps are prepared by conventional methods and the features in these maps representing by their areal size. This paper proposes the diffusion-based cartograms for visualization of the COVID-19 outbreak. In the study, daily country-level data of the first 150 days of the COVID-19 outbreak were obtained from WHO, and the spread and spatial patterns of the epidemic were presented according to the number of confirmed cases and deaths. As a result of the study, it was observed that the cartogram is a powerful visualization tool and superior to the classical methods.

新型冠状病毒（COVID-19）大流行是一类国际关注的突发公共卫生事件，已在全球范围内造成灾难性后果。为防控与管控此次疫情大流行，基于地理信息系统（Geographic Information Systems，GIS）的空间分析发挥了核心作用。为此，诸多国家及国际机构已制作了大量基于GIS的疫情地图。然而，此类地图均采用传统方法制作，其地图要素以面状尺寸进行表达。本文提出了基于扩散效应的变形统计图（cartogram），用于新冠疫情暴发态势的可视化呈现。本研究从世界卫生组织（World Health Organization，WHO）获取了新冠疫情暴发后前150天的每日国家级疫情数据，并基于确诊病例数与死亡病例数，呈现了疫情的传播态势与空间分布模式。研究结果表明，变形统计图是一款性能优异的可视化工具，其表现优于传统制图方法。