The Geographies of COVID-19

This volume of case studies focuses on the geographies of COVID-19 around the world. These geographies are located in both time and space concentrating on both first- and second-order impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. First-order impacts are those associated with the immediate response to the pandemic that include tracking number of deaths and cases, testing, access to hospitals, impacts on essential workers, searching for the origins of the virus and preventive treatments such as vaccines and contact tracing. Second-order impacts are the result of actions, practices, and policies in response to the spread of the virus, with longer-term effects on food security, access to health services, loss of livelihoods, evictions, and migration. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic will be prolonged due to the onset of variants as well as setting the stage for similar future events. This volume provides a synopsis of how geography and geospatial approaches are used to understand this event andthe emerging “new normal.” The volume's approach is necessarily selective due to the global reach of the pandemic and the broad sweep of second-order impacts where important issues may be left out. However, the book is envisioned as the prelude to an extended conversation about adaptation to complex circumstances using geospatial tools.

Using case studies and examples of geospatial analyses, this volume adopts a geographic lens to highlight the differences and commonalities across space and time where fundamental inequities are exposed, the governmental response is varied, and outcomes remain uncertain. This moment of global collective experience starkly reveals how inequality is ubiquitous and vulnerable populations – those unable to access basic needs – are increasing. This place-based approach identifies how geospatial analyses and resulting maps depict the pandemic as it ebbs and flows across the globe. Data-driven decision making is needed as we navigate the pandemic and determine ways to address future such events to enable local and regional governments in prioritizing limited resources to mitigate the long-term consequences of COVID-19.

Dr. Melinda Laituri is a professor of geography in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University. She was the Director of the Geospatial Centroid at CSU that provides support for geospatial research and teaching across the university. She is a visiting scientist at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. Laituri was a Jefferson Science Fellow where she was the principal investigator on the Secondary Cities Initiative, part of the State Department’s Office of the Geographer’s Humanitarian Information Unit mapping rapidly growing under-examined cities. She was the principal investigator on the Department of State’s Cities COVID Mapping and Mitigation program. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in Geography and held a three-year tenure track position at University of Auckland, New Zealand before joining Colorado State University. 

Dr. Robert B. Richardson is an ecological economist at Michigan StateUniversity with interests in the study of the environment and development, particularly the contribution of ecosystem services to socioeconomic well-being. His research, teaching, and outreach program focuses primarily on sustainable development, and he uses a variety of methods from the behavioral and social sciences to study decision-making about the use of natural resources and the values of ecosystem services. He has conducted research related to agricultural-environmental linkages, household food and energy security, and tradeoffs in decision-making about environmental management in southern and eastern Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, as well as in the USA. His work has been published in Ecological Economics, Environment and Development Economics, and World Development.

Junghwan Kim is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech. Before joining Virginia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. His research interests include human mobility, environmental health, GIScience methods, geoprivacy, and geospatial data ethics. His works have been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Transport Geography, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Environmental Research, and Transactions in GIS. He has received many prestigious awards, including the Peter Gould Award from the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group, the John Odland Award from the AAG Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group, and the American Planning Association (APA) Transportation Planning Division Student Paper Award.