Animated maps of epidemics and health

Three of these maps follow an outbreak from its first cases. The Black Death map covers the first wave, from the Golden Horde in 1346 to Moscow in 1353, modelled from more than 680 dated places. The COVID-19 map runs from a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan at the end of 2019 to May 2023. The Ebola map follows the Bundibugyo outbreak of 2026 through the health zones of DR Congo.

How to read them differs from map to map. On the Black Death map, land takes the colour of the half-year in which the plague arrived, and keeps it. The first part of the COVID-19 map colours each country by its new confirmed cases per million people; the second part shows the variant that made up most of the sequenced samples. Case counts depend on how much a country tests, so compare countries with care.

Two maps move more slowly. The Asian tiger mosquito, which can pass on dengue and chikungunya, appears region by region across Europe from 1979. Life expectancy at birth in Europe is shown for every year from 1945 to 2024, on one colour scale for all years.