Abstract
Key geographic concepts such as scale, space, diffusion, environmental context, and place are critical in guiding behaviors to slow COVID-19’s transmission and understand its uneven impacts. Geospatial tools such as maps, remotely sensed imagery, and location technology all played a role in visualizing the virus’s impact and implementing control measures. There is geography in the practices of social distancing, the privileging of outdoor settings, the stunning decline in mobility, and the attributes (or preconditions) of place that help to explain different health outcomes. Maps were the most public geographic tool that informed our understanding of the pandemic. Yet how many of us fell into a territorial trap, seeing borders as fixed or secure for a virus that did not comply with these notions? There is a long-established history of geographers mapping disease, yet the speed with which maps were created and updated during the pandemic is a stunning example of the geospatial digital revolution. As our daily geographies were reshaped by the pandemic, this essay highlights an explicit set of geographic concepts and tools at play. It also examines the work of the American Geographical Society as it questioned location-tracking technology as a tool to fight the pandemic.
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Price, M. (2022). How COVID Changed Our Daily Geographies. In: Laituri, M., Richardson, R.B., Kim, J. (eds) The Geographies of COVID-19. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11775-6_1
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