The Safest Place in a Pandemic: Point Roberts?

Point Roberts, Washington with Boundary Bay, the international border, suburban Vancouver B.C. and the North Shore Mountains in the distance.
Photo: M. Bjelland

The Guardian ran an online story yesterday on what might be the safest spot in the United States to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic: Point Roberts, Washington. Point Roberts is a geographical anomaly: a tiny exclave of the United States surrounded by ocean on three sides and Canada on the fourth. It is a quirky spot recently featured in a BBC Travel article. Point Roberts is only accessible by land through Canada and has no commercial ferry or air service. To get to Point Roberts, one must cross the U.S.-Canada border twice and drive through 23 miles of Canadian territory. It is rumored to be an ideal place for people on the witness protection plan. So, it is not surprising that Point Roberts wouldn’t have any cases of COVID-19 while the rest of western Washington struggles against an outbreak. (To be honest, given its small population, at the national rate, we’d only expect 2.5 cases in Point Roberts and getting tested would be quite a pain).

My family and I lived in Point Roberts during a 2011-2012 sabbatical. My poor kids had to ride a school bus through four international border crossings each day. Border crossing times of 2-3 hours were common and the special fast access Trusted Traveler program was an essential tool for coping with daily life in Point Roberts.

In an article on Point Roberts for The Geographical Review, I wrote:

It is an unincorporated U.S. community where gasoline prices are advertised in liters and the grocery store cash registers have separate drawers for U.S. and Canadian currency. Point Roberts is both a highly connected borderland region shaped by international flows of goods and people, and a place isolated by an increasingly hardened international boundary. Everyday life in the exclave of Point Roberts mirrors the contemporary world’s dynamic of boundedness and unboundedness as it entails both regular border crossings and frequent reminders of the powerful hold of the territorial state.

The global pandemic has certainly enhanced the hold of the territorial state. The isolation and boundedness experienced in Point Roberts has been deepened. Effective March 21, 2020, the Trusted Traveler program was suspended and the U.S.-Canada border was closed to all but essential services. Trucks delivering essential items and essential workers can cross the border. But the recent border hardening is going to put a damper on business and daily life in the transnational borderland of Point Roberts.

Two Cheers for the NY Times Cartographer

Tags

#COVID-19, #GIS, #mapping

Today the New York Times devoted significant ink to explaining some of the cartographic principles I wrote about in a post last week. Here they have added choropleth maps that are standardized for population. These maps are so much more useful. I hope the other news outlets notice and follow.

Notice how they have standardized their data by computing rates per 1,000 residents.

Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreading along Interstate Highway corridors?

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The U.S. Interstate Highway system is the dominant circulation system for people and goods in the United States, especially now with air travel sharply reduced. Now your first reaction to this map might be like mine: “duh, the virus is concentrated along the interstate highways because the highways connect the cities where most of the people live.” But that is not what this map shows. This map shows the doubling time for COVID-19 cases, not the total number of cases. The places along the interstate highways are the connected places and that’s what makes them vulnerable.

COVID-19 in the Midwest

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Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis…it keeps getting worse.

Suburbanization of COVID-19

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The outer suburban collar counties surrounding Boston showed the most rapid growth in confirmed COVID-19 cases in the seven days from March 25 to April 1, 2020.

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We see rapid growth in positive COVID-19 tests in a broad outer suburban/exurban arc surrounding Detroit, south of Chicago, south and east of Cleveland, and north of Pittsburgh

Doubling Times for COVID-19

Epidemiologists tell us that what matters most is the growth rate of new cases because contagious infections grow exponentially. This choropleth map depicts the doubling time for new COVID-19 cases calculated using data from March 25th and April 1st, 2020.

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The story here is isolated hot spots, rapid spread adjacent to existing centers of infection, and some hopeful news. The good news is that the Seattle region where the first U.S. case was detected and the first death recorded, has slowed the growth of new infections with aggressive social distancing. The doubling time in King County, Washington is 7.9 days which compares favorably to doubling times of 3.3 days in Los Angeles County, California, 3.5 days in Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit), 3.8 days in Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), and 4.8 days in Orleans Parish, Louisiana. In a future post, I will say more about interesting trends in the suburbs.

New CoVID-19 Cases

What a tragic week this has been. This proportional symbol map depicts the number of new confirmed cases of COVID-19 between March 25 and April 1, 2020. The map tells a couple of important stories: the continuing tragic increase in New York city and its suburbs and the emergence of new growth areas in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and New Orleans.

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Improving COVID-19 Maps

Tags

Choropleth Maps, COVID-19, GIS

Maps of the COVID-19 pandemic are everywhere and many could use improvement. Choropleth maps are easy to create in GIS or in a graphic design program. Raw data generally comes with summary totals for countries, states, or counties. The mapmaker simply shades each region based on its value, typically using light shades for low values and darker shades for high values. But if that is all the mapmaker does, a misleading map could result. That’s because countries, states, and counties come in all different sizes and populations. As Syracuse geographer Mark Monmonier writes in How to Lie with Maps, the human eye registers the visual prominence of large regions, regardless of their values, and will overlook small regions with high values. Here are two examples of choropleth maps of raw data from the recent COVID-19 outbreak.

This map uses a nice color ramp. But would you guess from this map that 43% of all cases in the United States were in New York state? If the mapmaker had simply divided the number of cases by the population, the true spatial patterns would be clear. Source: NBC News. URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-u-s-map-where-virus-has-been-confirmed-across-n1124546?icid=recommended

This map uses an even more effective color ramp with more categories, but normalizing for population would have made a huge difference in conveying the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

The solution is to use proportional symbol or dot density maps for raw counts or to normalize the data for choropleth maps. To normalize data we simply divide raw counts by the population or area of the region to convert raw counts into rates, percentages, or densities. Here is the NY Times version, a much more appropriate and effective proportional symbol map.

This is a highly effective proportional symbol map. It conveys the true spatial distribution of cases. As of this date, 43% of all cases were in New York state. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

Mapping Links for COVID-19

Tags

COVID-19, Interactive GIS, Web Mapping

Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard with Maps

Humanistic Geographic Information Systems Lab at the University of Washington

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Michigan COVID-19 Case Data and Map

Minnesota COVID-19 Case Data and Map

Hydropower

Tags

green energy, hydropower, maps

Hydropower is the largest source of renewable energy globally. Like other forms of renewable energy, its availability is constrained by physical geographic factors. Hydropower generation is limited to specific locations that allow engineers to harness a large flow of water and a significant elevation drop. Hydropower is not without its problems and the critiques of large dams are many. Still, it is affordable, non-polluting, and mostly carbon-neutral. When combined with widespread adoption of electric cars, as in Norway, it can be part of a path towards a cleaner, greener future.

Data Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration. Cartography: Mark D. Bjelland. Copyright 2020.