Who would have ever thought we’d be living through the biggest global health crisis in recent history?
Who’d have thought that, in order to find a path forward for society, we’d have to be recalibrating what’s ‘normal’ in our daily lives; eating out with friends, shaking hands or hugging in greeting. We’ve had to define what’s proper etiquette, or basic common sense, regarding how, when, and why to wear a mask. We quickly learned, on that point and many others, that we certainly don’t all agree.
Who would have guessed that, as a country, we would be experiencing a political division greater than any in modern history, further accentuating the differences—political and otherwise—in how we deal with a worldwide pandemic.
That said, I’ve wanted to somehow wrap my mind around the true impact of the Coronavirus spread in the United States and the rest of the world. Being a visual thinker myself, I thought it would be useful to see the progression in time-lapse form. Early on, I had started capturing daily snapshots of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center maps, with the full intention of compiling and editing together a time-lapse sequence, but I missed too many days off and on of capturing the map updates. With some research and a little luck I discovered an effort (on YouTube) by a company called Global Stats to post time-lapse representations of the Coronavirus spread, both in the US and internationally, mapping the sobering data in a clear and elegant way.
Who would have thought data (when used to communicate a difficult subject) could be beautiful?