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.