Outbreaks in South Korea

Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, I designed this Fathom visualization, retracing how cases in South Korea spread from city to city in the first few months.

The connections between patients are reconstructed from anonymized contact tracing data, which allows us to open multiple windows into each outbreak: charts of the case clusters as they emerge in social groups, homes and institutions; a map of the links between case locations as the virus is spread through travel; and the rise and fall of active cases as the visualization plays across time.

In the early stages of the pandemic, there was an emphasis on widely accessible, looser data collection methods like contact tracing – versus the more sophisticated forms of phylogenetic analysis that would follow as larger samples of sequencing data became available.

As rudimentary as the contact tracing data is, we experimented with outlining a simple network view that shows a dot for each patient and highlights the contacts that connect one outbreak cluster with another. Seen alongside the corresponding social groups, you can get a more informed sense of the multidirectional nature of the viral spread driving these outbreaks.