We all are dealing with a common enemy today — SARS-CoV-2, or the Novel Coronavirus, which originated from Wuhan, China, towards the end of last year. Apart from causing deaths and infecting millions of people worldwide, the virus has quite literally pushed the global economy into recession, forcing our well-connected global village into self-quarantine. The picture is grim, but could have been a lot worse, if we hadn’t figured out the origin of the virus, and could not track its movement.
History is replete with instances in which geographic information has played a key role in epidemiological breakthroughs, highlighting the power of ‘where’ in healthcare. Even today, governments and medical experts are extensively using maps to deal with all aspects of the pandemic — to from tracking cases to planning relief measures.
The practice of tracking a disease goes back to the 17th Century in 1692 when plague was wreaking havoc in Europe, Fillippo Arrieta, an Italian royal auditor, spatially visualized the strategy for containing the spread of the disease in Italy’s Bari region. On Arrieta’s map, Bari was separated from the rest of the country by a dashed line that represented a cordon sanitaire, which is similar to a containment zone of our times. The map shows two areas within Bari, separated from the cordoned-off province by a thick line.
There are several such fascinating stories, telling us about the strong connection between geographic information and epidemiology. Let’s turn the pages of history to revisit some of these stories.