Web app: COVID-19 spatio-temporal case density map

This web-application visualizes the spatio-temporal spread of the outbreak of a novel corona infectious disease (COVID-19) over Japan. The location of the COVID-19 outbreaks in this spatio-temporal map was obtained from a kind of voluntary geographical information of outbreaks in various facilities such as commercial facilities, restaurants, hospitals and offices (according to JX Press Corporation) while the vertical axis represents time of the outbreaks. This map provides a risk distribution of the on-going outbreaks as well as the past outbreaks in a high-resolution space-time realm. Thanks to the API provided by JX Press, the map has been automatically updated almost daily. https://nakaya-geolab.com/covid19-stkd/japan/

The map was originally made only for the outbreaks in the Tokyo metropolitan area which highlighted the city centres of Tokyo as the enduring epicentre.

The version of the Tokyo metropolitan area well as that of the Kansai (Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe area) are still available.

The space time density clouds were made by the space-time kernel density and volume rendering technique which were explained in a paper on crime analysis published in 2010. To use ArcGIS online as a platform to disseminate the space-time map as an interactive 3D scene, the space-time density tool for ArcGIS Pro was made and applied to the COVID-19 web app. The tool is available at the tool page.

New book released: “The Atlas of Health Inequalities in Japan” from Springer

This new health atlas of Japan was published in October, 2019. It contains a series of small-area based cartogram of health outcomes, mainly cause-specific mortality, in Japan with a variety of summary graphs of geographic health inequality measures, such as slope index of inequality (SII) and relative index of inequality (RII) during the period from 1995 to 2014. These contents highlight geographical aspects of social gradients in health by comparing mortality maps with distribution of area deprivation index during the recent long-lasting economic stagnation period of Japan known as the lost decades. This book also contains a variety of background explanations about the geography in Japan during the study period, including social areas in metropolitan regions and the Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) with huge Tsunami in 2011. The cover image is the prismic cartogram of standard mortality ratio of all-cause deaths for men during 2010-2014. This image shows a large amount of deaths in the coastal areas in the northern part of Japan as red coloured hills. This was caused by the Tsunami up to about 20m height in 2011. The image also highlights a large morality gaps within metropolitan regions reflecting socio-economic residential segregation. How should we tackle with the socio-geoggraphical inequalities of health for coming-ages?