COVID-19’s Spread Across the World
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820933370 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
20 POLITICAL INSIGHT • JUNE 2020
In Focus
On January 21, the World Health
Organisation (WHO) started
releasing regular situation reports of
a previously unknown viral disease
that was rst reported to the organisation’s
country oce in China three weeks earlier,
on New Year’s Eve. First broadly referred to as
Coronavirus, the outbreak was declared a Public
Health Emergency of International Concern on
30 January. The disease is now called COVID-19
(transmitted through the SARS-CoV-2 virus) and
was characterised by WHO as a global pandemic
on 11 March due to ‘the alarming levels of
spread and severity.’
Three months after the rst ocial gures
were released and four months after the rst
reports about the virus, the reported cases had
reached the 3.5 million mark. The number of
conrmed deaths due to COVID-19 exceeded
250,000.
As early May, the spread of the virus was still
a highly dynamic and evolving situation. But
the disease’s rst months allowed for an initial
assessment of the underlying spatial patterns
that have emerged, which do provide some
valuable insights into the development of this
crisis which has – so far – predominately aected
the wealthier part of the world.
This cartogram series is a visualisation of
the accumulated (hence growing) number of
conrmed cases of COVID-19 recorded by WHO
(with further adjustments made from data by
the European Centre for Disease Prevention and
Control and John Hopkins University). While
numbers are growing, the shape and size of all
maps maintain the same area over time, rather
than grow in size. This allows the changing
shares of reported cases in the major parts of the
world to become better visible.
In all the debates about the changing case
numbers, it remains important to keep in mind
that the gures reect those of reported cases
to which a lot of factors contribute. As much
as providing a somewhat comparable global
picture, these statistics may reect the places
that have tests, can aord to test and choose
to test, as much as the actual spread of the
disease itself. Therefore, the case count has as
much a political quality as an epidemiological
one. The real case gures throughout will
remain unknown, but it is certain that total case
numbers are likely to be considerably higher,
and that the degree to which they are higher
is highly variable between dierent countries.
(Comparability becomes even more dicult
when looking at death rates which are not the
focus of this contribution.)
The diculty in determining accurate case
numbers is also problematic for estimating
per capita gures that would help to better
understand how the various degrees of political
intervention in the rst weeks and months have
had an impact on the spread of the virus. By
the end of March, 100 countries had already
put some form of restrictions or full national
lockdown measures in place to tackle the spread
of COVID-19. Yet their eciency was subject to
controversial debate throughout. Lockdown
measures are one of the main reasons why this
pandemic is going to have a major impact on
the global economy in the years to come, with
all its political implications.
The evolving case numbers (and deaths) show
how COVID-19 has hit the most connected
countries in our globalised world rst and
hardest. This is unlike other epidemics in recent
decades which mostly aected the poorer parts
of the world and hence appeared more distant
and more abstract in the minds of ‘western’
populations and politicians.
The maps illustrate how it took two
months from the initial outbreak in China to
start spreading further in late February. The
unpreparedness of politics, not only in Italy, but
across Europe, became obvious, not only with
regards to providing support for the rst aected
regions, but also with a concerted response to
containing the spread of the disease. From the
COVID-19’s Spread
Across the World
Benjamin D. Hennig plots the spread of the pandemic in its first four months. outbreak in Italy it took just a few weeks for the
virus to sweep across Europe.
In its third stage, testimony to another
political failure, the next hotspot became
the USA, which took another few weeks to
become the country with the highest number
of reported cases and conrmed deaths. At the
same time, it appeared that restrictive measures
had started showing signs of a certain degree
of success in containing the virus’s spread, with
new case numbers growing at a slower pace or
in some instances going down.
Despite all the underlying caveats of these
statistics, an interim conclusion of this map
series highlights two points:
(1) This virus became the pandemic that
previous outbreaks such as SARS (2002-2004)
and H1N1 (2009) were feared to become. It
spread though the globally most connected
parts of the world and hence has so far aected
the wealthier nations that are well linked
through air travel, and characterised by vivid
and frequent global interconnectivity.
(2) What is remarkable is that despite previous
similar outbreaks in Asia, that the most aected
countries were so badly prepared to tackle the
virus. This demonstrates the unpreparedness
and underlying political failure to properly
address the threat of a pandemic in some of the
most auent countries.
COVID-19 has not yet reached many of
the emerging economies and developing
countries, some of which were severely aected
by past epidemics in recent times. While here,
many countries have shown decisive leadership
in following western countries’ lockdown
approaches, a major outbreak in these
parts of the world would have much worse
consequences, as mitigating the eects will
become an even more challenging task than
it has already become for the wealthier part of
the world.
Benjamin D. Hennig is Professor of Geography
at the University of Iceland and Honorary
Research Associate at the University of
Oxford.
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