Mapping the global spatio-temporal dynamics of COVID-19 outbreak using cartograms during the first 150 days of the pandemic.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a public health emergency of international concern that caused disaster consequences all over the world. To mitigate and manage the pandemic, geographical information systems (GIS)-based spatial analysis has been used in a key role. To this aim, many GIS-based maps are produced by many national and international institutions. However, the produced maps are prepared by conventional methods and the features in these maps representing by their areal size. This paper proposes the diffusion-based cartograms for visualization of the COVID-19 outbreak. In the study, daily country-level data of the first 150 days of the COVID-19 outbreak were obtained from WHO, and the spread and spatial patterns of the epidemic were presented according to the number of confirmed cases and deaths. As a result of the study, it was observed that the cartogram is a powerful visualization tool and superior to the classical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]