The New York Times tells us that we can use this map to “track the spread of the outbreak”. Can we? I challenge you to look at those six days of maps and tell me what has changed in this outbreak.

But the outbreak has changed, and we’ll see that below.

Maps distort the data

As noted above, the maps make it look like the entire country of China is engulfed by nCoV, but there are only about 35k cases in a population of 1.4 billion. Only 0.002% of people in China have coronavirus!

Likewise the CNN map of “coronavirus’ global spread”, above, seems to show that North America, Europe, Australia, and Russia are, along with China, solidly infected — when there are a total of 12 cases, for example, in the US, out of a population of 330 million.

Sequential maps might be a good way of showing the international expansion of the disease IF it was spreading substantially on an international basis but it isn’t (at least not yet): there are fewer than 400 cases of this coronavirus outside of China. In the US, for example, there are 12. One week ago there were 7. Not exactly a wildfire.