Geovisualization of COVID-19: State of the Art and Opportunities

Mapping the prevalence and spread of infectious diseases has never been more critical than during the COVID-19 pandemic. A plethora of Web-based GIS dashboards have been created that incorporate basic GIS functionality; these dashboards have served as platforms for rapid data sharing and real-time information, ultimately facilitating decision making. However, many of them have merely focused on presenting and monitoring cumulative or daily incidence of COVID-19 data, disregarding the temporal dimension. In this paper, we review the usefulness of GIS-based dashboards for mapping the prevalence of COVID-19, but also missed opportunities to emphasize the temporal component of the disease (cyclicity, seasonality). We suggest that advanced geovisualization techniques can be used to integrate the temporal component in interactive animated maps illustrating (a) the daily relative risk and the number of days a geographic region has been in a disease cluster, (b) the ratio between the observed and expected number of cases over time, and (c) mortality count dynamics in a space–time cube. We illustrate these approaches by using COVID-19 cases and death counts across the U.S. at the county level from 25 January 2020 to 1 October 2020. We discuss how each of these visualization approaches can promote the understanding of important public health concepts applied to the pandemic such as risk, spread, and mortality. Finally, we suggest future avenues to promote research at the intersection of space–time visualization and infectious diseases.