A lot of the maps I see showing coronavirus cases, even from sources like the CDC, have a problem: They’re labeled by country, or by state. It’s too big to be useful.

• Labeling the number of cases reported in the US doesn’t tell you that they’re mostly in clusters in Washington and California.
• Labeling the number of cases in California doesn’t tell you that they’re mostly in northern California.

What matters for tracking its spread is actual location and transportation links, not jurisdiction.

Note: Cleaned up a bit from my original post on Mastodon.

Update 2024: It’s weird to look back at this now that the virus is literally everywhere (except maybe still Antarctica and the International Space Station?) and will be with us forever. That there was a time when it was still on the horizon but hadn’t arrived here (for whatever your value of “here” might have been) yet.