To save lives: Lessons of a pandemic cartographer

Abstract

For almost everyone in the world, the last few years have been unlike any experienced in their lifetimes. The public health crisis, spawned by the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus and the outbreak of COVID‐19, presented a geospatial analysis challenge like none other as public health officials, emergency rooms, and the general public struggled to track the spread of the disease, allocate resources for testing and care, and understand the origin of this new zoonotic pathogen. During this period, the combination of rapid and open access genomic data combined with case counts and the mapping tools of geographic information systems allowed for near real‐time tracking of the pandemic. This paper describes these tools, how they were used to advise policy‐makers in the US at the height of the pandemic, and some of the lessons learned.