Numerous European health authorities have created interactive dashboards that visualize the COVID-19 situation in their respective countries. These maps are often very detailed and display the data on a regional or even local level. Pan-European maps, like the one of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, are typically not as detailed. By pooling the data of the national dashboards, we were able to create a prototype of a European COVID-19 situation map that features local level data. Our map displays the cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants in different provinces and counties across Europe during the last seven days. Different colors indicate how quickly SARS-CoV-2 is spreading in the different areas.
The code necessary to visualize the case reports is only a couple of lines long. However, compiling the necessary data from many different sources proved to be rather tedious. Moreover, language barriers prohibited us from gathering even more data. Obviously, as can be seen from the many national dashboards, the data are there, they just have to be put together in a standardized way. Our project is an example of what the final result could look like. With our work, we hope to inspire European health authorities to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
While our map displays the cumulative number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants during the last seven days, the map of the ECDC reports the number of cases during the last fourteen days.
Not all counties and provinces report on a daily basis. Consequently, the data of some counties and provinces might be older.
Due to upload size restrictions by RPubs we had to rescale most of the polygons in the underlying shapefile. Therefore, some of the polygons are somewhat imprecise.
Some provinces/counties in the map seam to have negative infection rates. In these instances the raw data showed inconsistent case numbers suggesting that some of the data had been subject to corrections and revisions. Nevertheless, we processed these data as they are, resulting in the values shown on the map.
This is the work of two friends, who worked on this project in their spare time. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of the data displayed here.
Austria:
Belgium:
England:
France:
Germany:
Italy:
Netherlands:
Norway:
Spain:
Sweden:
Switzerland: