Vaccine Deserts

 A new vaccine equity planning tool has been launched by Ariadne Labs. It shows vaccine deserts, defined as areas with limited access to vaccinations. You can pick a state or zip code and see where these are. Here is Ohio.

There is a pretty clear pattern of rural areas having the least access. In contrast, earlier in 2021, there were rural and urban deserts as detailed by a Deloitte study quoted in the Missouri Independent. Here is a map showing (in blue) the deserts of Missouri,

Images via the Kansas City Star

and a close up of Kansas City.

The Ariadne tool is designed so that planners can advance their outreach to the areas most in need. From their web page.

“Vaccines are now increasingly available across the U.S., yet there is still a population struggling with access. Not everyone has the ability or time to spend an hour out of their workday or more to get their vaccine. By accounting for different modes of transportation — including public transit and walking — we hope public health officials and providers will gain a deeper understanding of how to reach all communities,” said Katherine Chou, Director, Product Management, Google Health.

Some of these deserts are in empty, disconnected, or wet areas such as this spot on the coast of Maryland so the tool is imperfect, like everything in mapping.

Some Interesting Epidemic maps

Here is one interesting side effect of the shutdowns caused by a global pandemic; reduced emissions. The video below shows how northern Italy under lockdown has greatly reduced their Nitrogen Dioxide emissions.

To get an idea of how bad and long lasting the situation can get it can be useful to look at past deadly outbreaks.

There was a good article a few years ago on mapping the "Russian Flu" epidemic of 1889-90 from the National Library of Medicine. It includes this color coded map published in Germany a few years later. Each color represents a time period of the spread of the flu from its origins in Central Asia.

The legend gives a good idea of the time periods involved.

The article also includes an animation of the spread based on this map - it can be seen here.

Finally, here is a pretty awful map from today's online version of the New York Times.

All of western Europe is labeled as "Italy", the label placement for South Korea is confusingly poor, the bright orange is more alarmist than it needs to be and Japan is not even colored in the alarmist color.

Mapping Drug Research in South Africa

Professor Anne Pollock created Mapping iThemba, an interactive map for a research project on health issues based at iThemba Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company based on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Pollock wrote the text while the map was illustrated by J. Russell Huffman.  The lack of a traditional mapping background of the map's creators makes for a unique visual presentation. It does not look like a typical GIS or Google-based map though there are Google-y teardrop-shaped icons to click for more information.

The non-strict locational accuracy allows the highlights to be shown more clearly and frees up a more artistic interpretation. The map shows relevant details, leaving out many other details of the Pretoria-Johannesburg area, most notably the sprawl.

Except where needed-surrounding the medial campus. 

There are many other interesting details and side stories such as the historic dynamite factory, now a museum.

Those of us who make maps professionally often complain about maps made by non-cartographers but in the hands of the right people the results can be pretty nice.

Crowdsourced Mapping Helps Fight Ebola

Ten years ago this month Google acquired a mapping company called Where 2 Technologies and began to create Google Maps. Despite the tremendous growth of Google Maps over the last 10 years, there are still areas that are poorly mapped. When Doctors Without Borders wanted maps of the areas in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia that are most affected by Ebola, they turned to OpenStreetMap, a worldwide, crowdsourced mapping project. A recent article from Fast Company Labs details how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has gotten volunteers to quickly map cities like Gueckedou in Guinea. This image compares the level of detail between the two mapping services.

OpenStreetMap is on the left, Google Maps on the right. The limitations of this blog page make this hard to see so I manipulated the images to compare them up and down.

Andrew Buck, A volunteer with HOT is quoted in the fastcolabs article as saying that Google's business model is selling advertising and “Starbucks isn't paying for Google to advertise over there so there's very little incentive for Google to improve its maps.”  

In fairness to Google, the OpenStreetMap for Gueckedou much less detailed than Google before the HOT team got mapping.

Since March the team has mapped over 8 million objects. The article has a nice animation showing the edits made in West Africa in the last six months. I was not able to it reproduce here but you can see it on their page.

OpenStreetMap has helped relief efforts by identifying unknown villages, sorting out similar village names, coordinating logistics and allowing relief workers to predict the paths used by infected persons and therefore areas that are more likely to be in need of aid.

Canadians Are Not Themselves Today

Partners for Mental Health, a Canadian charity has introduced the Not Myself Today campaign. They want to get Canadians to sign a pledge of support for mental health and encourage them to talk openly about it. Part of the campaign is a crowd sourced mood map.

Each town or city is color coded by the the most predominant mood. When I first grabbed this screen shot Montreal was a nice calm blue though a large percentage of the respondents were also anxious or confused. Today the mood seems to have soured a bit, perhaps because of the gloomy weather? Montreal is anxious, Laval is irritated, St. Jean Sur Richelieu is confused, Mirabel is completely depressed while St. Jerome is sad, depressed and empty. On the bright side Pointe Claire is okay and Chateauguay is hopeful.

White means happy. Unfortunately there's not a lot of white but Pembroke's doing OK and Woodlawn is mostly happy though a bit stressed.

I assume the circle size represents the number of responses but they don't actually say that. It would be interesting to see if the moods correlate with weather but today is not a good day for that as it seems the entire country is cloudy. Hopefully this mapping project will help people feel better about themselves. Try to have a Selkirk, Manitoba kind of day!

Chart of the Week-Mind the Gap!

Hans Rosling is a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He creates animated charts in an attempt to counter myths about the "developing world." Very basic shapes and colors make the patterns clear. Here is an example of his work, a chart showing child mortality vs. income for the countries of the world. The dots are sized by population and colored by region. Note the compass rose too.


However it gets more interesting to see these charts in action as they appear in his gapminder web site - the name inspired by London's Underground. While the chart above shows much of Asia and Africa lagging behind, the animations show the "developing world" catching up and improving at a quicker rate than much of the West did. Here is are some frames of a 200 year time sequence showing life expectancy vs. income. Click the frames to get the web page. You can also choose countries to highlight and hover over a point to get the country name.









If you have time and a decent internet connection, watch this video. He is entertaining and it may change the way you look at the world.

MOTW #46

This map was done as part of a study of food choices around University City High School in Philadelphia. The map lets you choose categories of food and recreational opportunities in an attempt to advocate for better opportunities to make healthy choices in an inner city neighborhood.

MOTW #1

Map of the Week #1

Program Note: Map of the week has been an e-mail list since some time in 2005. This was probably not the first one but it is the first map after I decided to keep track of them.
Note 2: Most of these first 50 or so maps did not have comments and some of them are unattributed. I will try to give credit where due fr these. Hopefully nobody gets bent out of shape about that.

This is a map of Avian Flu courtesy of the UN World Food Program.