The best of last week’s big and small data visualizations
Rose Mintzer-Sweeney
Welcome back to the 23rd edition of Data Vis Dispatch! Every week, we’ll be publishing a collection of the best small and large data visualizations we find, especially from news organizations — to celebrate data journalism, data visualization, simple charts, elaborate maps, and their creators.
Recurring topics this week include COVID in Europe, maternal mortality in the U.S., and maps of water.
Let's kick things off with charts on political and economic issues. Of course that includes elections:
COVID cases are soaring in Europe — and as the Süddeutsche Zeitung points out, what we're seeing is exactly what was forecast for the current level of vaccination:
So yes, vaccines work really well. Unfortunately, the pace of booster vaccination is lagging well behind the speed of the first rounds. And even more unfortunately, even that limited rollout has already surpassed first-dose vaccination in poor countries:
Besides vaccines, what else is helping us through the pandemic? Testing helps, as an unfortunate natural experiment in Britain has shown. And a new analysis shows that the drug ivermectin may have helped some patients after all — for a very straightforward reason:
November's #30daymapchallenge continued this week with the theme "water":
@researchremora: "Day 18, #30DayMapChallenge: water! Here are two bathymetric maps of Lake Michigan. Couldn't decide which one I liked more, the one with topography or the one without," November 18 (Tweet)Ewa Grabska-Szwagrzyk: "#30DayMapChallenge Day 18 - Water Meanders of Bug river in Poland - actual and former channel courses depicted using hillshade and elevation made in #QGIS with elevation data from @GUGiKgovpl," November 18 (Tweet)Dominic Royé: "#30DayMapChallenge 2021 Day 18 - Water Fishing activity," November 18 (Tweet)Kenneth Wong: "#30DayMapChallenge Day 18 - Water Thickness of ice sheets in Antarctica. Not until I searched for datasets of the antarctic did I realise how thick polar ice could be (It's 4.6 km deep!)," November 18 (Tweet)
The Washington Post got in on the water maps action too:
And other charts and maps covered everything from seven booming African cities, to the debate over hunting in France, to the price of chicken feed in Tunisia:
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