Mapping Mortality Rates from Covid

El Confidencial has published an interactive map which visualizes the mortality rate from Coronavirus across Spain. The map in The Black Hole of Covid Mortality reveals that there have been quite large differences in the mortality rates across different Spanish municipalities. 

The article accompanying the map does a good job at dismissing some of the possible reasons for the large differences in mortality rates from Covid-19 across the different regions of Spain, without ever really tying down the real reasons why some municipalities have fared far worse from Covid-19 than others.

My first thought was that the differences might be related to age. However El Confidencial discovered that "the municipalities with the most deaths per inhabitant do not coincide with those with older populations". I also wondered if the differences in mortality rates may be related to population density. However El Confidencial was only able to obtain mortality rates for municipalities of more than 500 people. Therefore the overall picture revealed by the interactive map is skewed a little because large areas of Spain (those with the lowest population densities) don't show any mortality rate data on the map.

In both the USA and the UK average income levels has had an impact on infection rates. This may be because those on the smallest incomes are less able to furlough, are more likely to rely on public transit and more likely to work in occupations which require face-to-face interactions with the public.

Left: Mortality rates from Covid-19. Right: Average Incomes

Spanish newspaper El Pais has mapped out the average income per person across the whole of Spain. The Map of Spanish Incomes, Street by Street shows that there is quite a stark divide between the north and south of the country. A comparison of El Confidencial's mortality rate map with El Pais' average income map doesn't reveal an exact correlation between income levels and mortality rates from Covid-19. However a comparison of the two maps does suggest that mortality rates in some of the poorest municipalities in Spain are particular high - especially in the south and in the north-east of the country.

Map Projection Playground

Projection Playground is a useful tool for exploring, editing and visualizing different map projections in the browser. The tool allows you to compare nearly 100 different types of map projection and adjust the projection settings to explore how different changes effect the way that the world is displayed.

Playing with the different projections in Projection Playground and adjusting the projection settings is a great way to explore how different map projections distort the size of countries around the world. 

Over the years there have been quite a number of clever interactive demonstrations of how different map projections represent the geography of the world. Here are a few other interactive tools which can help you learn about map projections.

If you are interested in how different map projections distort the world then you will probably like Projection Face. Projection Face is a great illustration of the distortions created by different map projections. The interactive shows how 64 different map projections effect our view of the world by showing each projection's effect when applied to something very familiar - the human face.

The distortions of each of the different projections can be illustrated further by clicking and dragging any of the mapped faces. This illustrates how the different map projections can be distorted themselves simply by changing the center of the map.

Projections Face is an interactive version of a 1924 illustration from Elements of Map Projection with Applications to Map and Chart Construction.
 

Comparing Map Projections is a clever visualization of different map projections. It allows you to directly compare different types of map projections and see the levels of distortions which each map projection introduces by visualizing a globe in two dimensions.

This interactive visualization provides a useful overview of the advantages and the disadvantages of specific map projections. For example if you select the much maligned Mercator map projection you can see that it scores very low for angular distortion. This means that all the lines of longitude are straight (compare the vertical lines of longitude on the Mercator projection to those on the Sinusoidal projection). The result is that a Mercator projection is really useful for navigation.

However when you explore the Mercator projection on the Comparing Map Projections interactive visualization you will also see that it has very large overall scale and angular distortion. A consequence of having a very low angular distortion is that the Mercator projection distorts scale (especially the further you move from the equator).

As you can see from Comparing Map Projections all map projections introduce some degree of distortion. 

  

If you want a little help deciding which map projection you should use for your current map project then you can use the Projection Wizard to decide on the best projection.

This map projection guide allows you to select the extent of the map view you are working with by outlining the area on a Leaflet map. Once you've highlighted your map bounds you can choose a distortion property (Equal-area, Conformal, Equidistant or Compromise).

The Projection Wizard will then suggest which map projection you should use depending on the extent and the distortion property of the map. The suggested projections are based on 'A Guide to Selecting Map Projections' by the Cartography and Geovisualization Group at Oregon State University.

A Proj.4 link is provided next to each suggested projection, which opens a popup window with a Proj.4 library. Once you've settled on your map projection you might want to check-out the Proj4Leaflet plugin for using projections supported by Proj4js with Leaflet powered maps.

Mapping Internet Speeds

The European Data Journalism Network has mapped out internet speeds across Europe. The interactive map Average internet speed across Europe allows you to view the average download and upload speeds in areas across the continent, as recorded in the second quarter of 2021. 

The fastest average internet speeds can be found in Iceland, Switzerland and Denmark. The slowest internet speed is in North Macedonia, with Albania and Greece not far behind. Within most individual countries there can also be large gaps in internet speed, with urban areas tending to have far faster speeds than rural areas across the European continent. 

The data used for the map comes from Speedtest. This data reveals that overall in Europe over the last 18 months average download speeds have increased by 51.9%. Cyprus (+87.4%), France (+76%), Italy (+74.8%) made the largest improvements in average download speeds. 

Earlier this summer the U.S.'s Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released a new interactive map that visualizes key indicators of broadband needs across the USA. The map uses data from a number of different sources to show broadband availability and speeds at the county level.

If you click on a county on the The Indicators of Broadband Need digital map you can view details on the percentage of the local population without Internet access, the median broadband speed available, and the percentage of downloads completed over 25 Mbps.

The map reveals that large areas of the country have broadband access which is below the Federal Communications Commission's recommended benchmark of 25 Mbps download / 3 Mbps upload. The map also includes a number of other economic data layers which allow you to view and compare poverty data with broadband access data.

German Election Results

The Social Democrats (SPD) narrowly beat Angela Merkel's CDU party in yesterday's federal elections in Germany. Although the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) appear to have come a close second, the rise in popularity of some of the other political parties means that the CDU achieved their worst ever election return.

You can explore the election results across Germany on the Berliner Morgenpost's Bundestagwahl 2021 interactive map. This map colors each electoral district to show the party with the highest votes. You can also select each individual political party individually to view how the party performed in every single electoral district. The Berliner Morgenpost's map shows a clear geographical north-south divide with the SPD proving the most popular party in the north and the CDU performing best in the south of the country.

The extreme right-wing German Nationalist party AfD was the most popular party in a number of electoral districts in the former East Germany. The Green party was the most popular party in a few electoral districts in some of the larger cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt.

The Berliner Morgenpost has also created a very detailed map of the results in every one of Berlin's 1507 electoral wards. The Bundestagwahl Berlin 2021 map provides an extremely detailed view of how each party performed at the neighborhood level in the capital. The Berliner Morgenpost maps were created by the Funke Interaktiv data visualization team of the the Funke Media Group. They have also created very detailed interactive maps for their local newspapers in Hamburg and Thuringia. 

The German newspaper Zeit has also published an interactive map which shows the national German election results. Zeit's Bundestagwahl 2021 map colors each electoral district to show the level of support of the leading political party. The newspaper has also published small multiples maps to show how each of the six political parties performed across every district. These individual maps allow you to explore how each party performed across the whole of the country. For example the AfD and Linke both performed best in electoral districts in the former East Germany. Conversely the CDU appears to have achieved its least number of votes in districts in the former East Germany.

Hat-tip: Lisa Muth has been compiling links to some of the best data visualizations of the German election results on this Twitter thread (I have written only about some of the maps mentioned in this thread)

High Vaccination, Low Hospitalization

Kenneth Field has posted a nice critique of a Washington Post bivariate choropleth map showing America’s hospitalization and vaccination divide.The Post's bivariate map uses colors to visualize two different variables on one map - the Covid-19 vaccination rate and the Covid-19 hospitalization rate in every U.S. health region.

Kenneth's Cartoblography post praises the map for making it very clear that "Regions with more vaccinations have fewer hospitalizations." This is where I have to make an embarrassing carto-confession - I often find bivariate choropleth maps difficult to read. When I first looked at the Post's map I thought that the dark colors in Texas, Florida and Oregon identified these areas as having high rates of vaccinations and also high rates of hospitalizations. I also read the map as saying that the light colored Kansas has a low rate of vaccinations and a low rate of hospitalization.

The Post's article also includes a scatterplot of the same two variables which I find a lot easier to read. Looking at this scatterplot reveals that Kansas probably is an outlier (although because the plot isn't interactive I am having to guess that one of those two dots in the bottom-left segment indicates Kansas). However this scatterplot also reveals that there are no regions in the highest vaccination / highest hospitalization sector (however it does appear that parts of Oregon and Florida are in fact close to that sector)

I think that I find the Post's bivariate choropleth map hard to read because it has 16 different colors and it isn't just a matter of light hues = good / dark hues = bad (or vice versa). As Kenneth points out in his critique the Post does help the reader by using annotations both on the map legend and on the map itself to help the reader understand the data.However I do find that the use of so many colors on bivariate maps means that I often have to work towards comprehension. That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing but it might be a factor worth considering if you want to visualize two different variables on one map.

Obviously the Post's accompanying article also makes clear the correlation between vaccinations and hospitalizations. The data is unequivocal - vaccinations work. Areas of the country which have the highest vaccination rates tend to have the lowest hospitalizations for Covid-19. Conversely those regions of America with the lowest vaccination rates tend to have some of the highest hospitalization rates for Covid-19. 

The message couldn't be clearer. If you haven't done so already then you need to get vaccinated! 

Your Probable Future

Climate change is likely to seriously effect your life in the coming decades. Many of these effects are hard to predict. However scientists are able to predict with some certainty how global heating is likely to effect such things as the temperature, extreme precipitation and the occurrence of droughts around the world.

Probable Futures has mapped out how different climate change scenarios could effect future weather conditions around the world. This includes interactive maps which show you how different levels of global heating will effect the likelihood of extreme drought conditions, the number of extreme heat days you can expect, and the frequency of extreme precipitation events.

Using Probable Futures' maps you can explore how different climate change scenarios are likely to effect the climate where you live and at other locations around the globe. The Probable Futures visualizations are part of a growing trend to help explain how global heating is likely to effect our lives.If you live in the USA you can also discover how climate change will effect you on a ProPublica interactive map.

In New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States ProPublica show how different parts of the U.S. are likely to be affected by global heating. The ProPublica map shows where extreme heat will become commonplace, where growing food will become very difficult and where dangerous 'wet bulb' conditions will become the norm.

The New York Times has also released an interactive map which attempts to explain how global heating will effect the climate where you live. If you enter your county into Every Place Has Its Own Climate Risk. What Is It Where You Live? you can find out which climate risks will become most extreme in your area.

The NYT's interactive map colors areas of the United States to show the climate risks which will be most extreme in different part of the USA. For example most of the East Coast will face increased risks from severe hurricanes, much of the Midwest will experience extreme heat, the Western states will face extreme droughts and the Western states will see higher risk from wildfire. If you hover over your county on the map you can see the risks that your county will face in six different categories; hurricane risk, extreme rainfall risk, water stress risk, sea level rise risk, heat stress risk and wildfire risk.

Of course as a result of global heating most countries will experience higher average temperatures. A National Geographic interactive feature can show you how hot your region will become by comparing it to a city which currently experiences average temperatures that your home town can expect in the year 2070.

If carbon emissions continue to rise at the current rate then by 2070 the world will experience devastating climate change. For example Boston, Massachusetts will experience temperatures 5 degrees centigrade hotter than today and 49 mm more rain will fall. This is similar to the climate that Bardwell, Kentucky has today.

In Your Climate, Changed the National Geographic uses an interactive map to show the future climate analogs of 2,500 cities around the world. These analogs are based on worst-case climate change scenario assumptions. The map automatically detects your location to show you your nearest future global heating twin. The map also explains what kind of climate zone your city currently experiences and compares that to the likely climate it will have in 2070.

1914 Street View of New York

Chris Whong has mapped out a collection of vintage photos from the New York Historical Society to create a virtual Stroll Down Flatbush Avenue circa 1914. Chris recently discovered the society's Subway Construction Photograph Collection, 1900-1950". This collection of vintage photographs of New York includes a continuous series of photographs taken on Flatbush Avenue, from Grand Army Plaza to the present-day Barclays Center. Chris has geolocated and mapped every one of this series to create an historical Street View tour of 1914 Flatbush Avenue.

It is not often that you get a chance to travel back in time over 100 years. I had a lot of fun walking down Flatbush Avenue on Chris's map just noting the many sights that you now no longer see in New York. These sights include barber poles, cigar store Indians, trolley stations, hat cleaners and horse-drawn delivery carriages. 

Being a bit of nerd I also took a virtual walk along the same section of Flatbush Avenue using Google Street View. The 21st Century walk is a lot more unpleasant than the early 20th Century walk. Nowadays there are four lanes of busy car traffic (with an additional two lanes of street parking), 90% of the stores seem to sell fast food and worst of all there are far fewer hats than there used to be. 

If you enjoy exploring the New York of yesteryear then you can also explore vintage photographs of the city on the excellent Street View of 1940's NYC and Street View of 1980s.NYC. In the 1940's, and again in the 1980's, the New York Works Progress Administration took photographs of every building in the city, in order to help estimate property values and property taxes. These two interactive maps allow you to browse these huge collections of New York street scenes by location. Like Chris's map they allow you to travel back in time and explore Street View scenes of New York during different eras of its history.

The La Palma Volcano Eruption

On Sunday the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma erupted. The lava flow from this eruption has already destroyed over 200 homes and led to the evacuation of 5,000 people. Like all of the Canary Islands the island of La Palma was originally formed from volcanic activity. Along with Tenerife La Palma is one of the most volcanically active of the Canary Islands.

Mapbox's Jonni Walker has used data from the Copernicus Rapid Mapping Team to create a bird's eye view map of the lave flow (shown at the top of this post). This map does an impressive job of showing the scale and direction of the lava flow.

You can view an interactive map of the lava flow which was created the Instituto Geográfico Nacional de España. The institute's map shows the extent of the lava flow, the location of the volcanic eruption and the location of all recorded earthquake tremors on La Palma recorded in the last ten days. 

Spanish newspaper El Pais has mapped out the forecast path of the lava flow over the next few days. A slowdown in the advance of the magma means that the lava flow has yet to meet the sea. The red areas on this map are those which are most likely to be affected by the lava flow.

It is estimated that the eruption has led to the emission of around 6,000-9,000 tons of sulfur-dioxide (SO2) per day into the atmosphere. The impressive animated weather map Windy includes a SO2 layer, which means you can view an animated forecast of where this S02 is likely to end up over the next few days. The map suggests that the SO2 is already drifting over northern Africa reaching as far as Turkey and Syria.

America's Falling Prison Population

The Marshall Project has used 2020 census data to compare the incarceration rates of different U.S. counties and to visualize the trend in incarceration rates since the 2010 census. The headline story in the Marshall Project's analysis of the data is that There Are Fewer People Behind Bars Now Than 10 Years Ago.

The Marshall Project's analysis includes two maps. One (pictured above) uses proportional circles to show the number of incarcerated people in each county. Another cartogram map shows the change in the incarceration rate in every state, from the 2010 to 2020 censuses.Only four states - West Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska and Arkansas - had a higher incarceration rate in 2020. In every other state the incarceration rate was lower in 2020 than it was in 2010. 

The Marshall Project warns that the effect of the Covid pandemic on the court system and on prison and jail populations means that it may be "impossible to draw any long-term conclusions from the apparent drop seen in Census data." 

Last month CNN used the newly released 2020 census data to create a racial dot map of America. The interactive map in Race and ethnicity across the nation uses colored dots to visualize the population density and racial mix of every neighborhood in the country. Ben Schmidt's All of US is another interactive dot map which allows you to compare population data from the 2020 and 2010 US censuses.Ben's 'dot' map actually uses Wee People rather than dots to represent the U.S. population.

Canadian Election Maps

 

Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party has won a third term as a result of Monday's election in Canada. The Liberals will probably win 156 seats overall, which is one less than in the 2019 election and some way short of the 170 seats needed to form a majority government. For the second election in a row it looks like the Conservative Party has won the popular vote but won fewer electoral districts than its main rival.

The Globe and Mail's Live Updates page includes an interactive map which colors electoral districts based on the party currently winning in the count. If you click on a riding on the map then you can view the total number of votes cast for each candidate and their percentage of the overall vote.

The Globe and Mail's map is a pretty good example of how a geographical map of Canadian election results can be very visually misleading. On this map large rural electoral districts distort the overall picture. For example despite having won only 25 seats the NDP seem to be the largest party in Canada (because they are the most popular party in many of the largest rural electoral ridings). Conversely the Liberal Party (who have won the most seats but predominantly in the geographically smaller urban electoral districts) on this map appear to have done very poorly. 

This visual distortion of the results is also apparent on the Toronto Star's Live Results interactive map. Like the Globe and Mail map the Star's map is great if you want to check the results in an individual electoral district but isn't so great at representing the overall picture of the 2021 Canadian election. This is also true of the election results map on CBC's Federal Election Results page.

A better way of visualizing the Canadian election results could be by using a cartogram. The Electoral Cartogram of Canada provides a fantastic overall view of election results in Canada (although at the time of writing they haven't yet added this year's election results). This map represents each electoral district as an equal sized hexagon. The advantage of using a cartogram is that this map doesn't visually exaggerate the results of large rural electoral electoral areas with low population densities over smaller urban ridings with much higher population densities.

This cartogram view much more clearly shows the overall picture of an election. For example the Liberal Party's narrow win in 2019 is far more legible on this map than on the Globe and Mail's 2021 electoral map.