Why so many of the COVID-19 graphs you see are misleading
Hand washing is one of the most important things you can be doing right now (Pexels/)The magnitude of COVID-19′s grip has come at the world fast making it difficult to grasp. Sometimes, visualizing the statistics makes them easier to comprehend. By now, you’ve probably seen hundreds of maps strewn across the internet, depicting coronavirus cases around the world, and countless graphs and charts showing the dramatic rise in confirmed cases over the past few weeks. The problem is that COVID-19 has become such a complex disease that it has proven itself difficult to visualize accurately.Take what has become the predominant way to show case counts: a map. Visualizing where in the world has the most number of confirmed coronaviruses cases isn’t an inherently bad idea—at PopSci, we made such a map towards the beginning of the outbreak precisely because it seemed smart to show readers where the epidemic was hitting...