Patterns
PerspectiveWelcome to the revolution: COVID-19 and the democratization of spatial-temporal data
The bigger picture
Availability of data during the current pandemic has been facilitated by open access databases summarized in dashboard maps, tables, and charts. This provided an unprecedented opportunity for not only academic research but popular reportage. Dashboard data have increasingly been joined to demographic data provided by census and other digitally stored socioeconomic data in a manner permitting journalists and researchers to analyze local and regional outbreaks and the demographics that have propelled specific outbreaks. This democratization has permitted unprecedented public exposure to the realities of the pandemic, and its propellants, at every scale. In the future, the likelihood is that the type of deep investigation of an epidemic or pandemic will be as much a matter of journalistic examination as it has been, in the past, of professional research. What once took perhaps a year for analysis and journal publication is now occurring over weeks of public analysis. The effect has been immense on the public presentation of pandemic news and the realities of local outbreaks. Its focus on socioeconomic forces encouraging intense local outbreaks—for example, in long-term facilities—are arguments for political focus on structural failures in the social safety net. This is revolutionary and … evolutionary. It is the newest phase of a “digital revolution” begun in the 1960s and a long history in public health explorations of disease events and the socioeconomic sources that propel them. For the latter, books like my Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping and Medicine or Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground attempt to both trace the history of epidemics through their mapping and public data from yellow fever (in the 18th century) and cholera (in the 19th century) through this century’s Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Data science maturity
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Tom Koch is an adjunct professor of medical geography at the University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada, and a consultant in ethics and chronic care at the Alton Medical Center in Toronto, ON, Canada. His work on the history of data, mapping, and the study of epidemic disease has resulted in numerous papers—academic and popular—and books including Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping and Medicine (2017) as well as Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground 2011. Background and illustrations for this article were drawn, in part, from those resources.