I really dislike these maps that use circles. The circles overlap, are hard to reason about spatially and the size seems to be an arbitrary scale without meaning.
The thing that drives my OCD nuts is that in Europe, all of the circles are centered the centroid of the country, except Germany.
Weird. Is Germany's circle at the centroid of West Germany, maybe?
Also only seems to show the cumulative counts, rather than the counts per day, per region, which makes it impossible to tell where the situation is improving or deteriorating.
It is confusing. Is the idea that the circle corresponds to the area that the virus may have spread to locally?
The size of the circle I think is related to the logarithm of the number of cases in that area.
Totally agree. But if you zoom in, the circles do stop overlapping, which helps.
A simple table without country name is much easier to understand for someone with basic geographic knowledge. Maps are not always the best approach.
If they had more detailed locations like at the city level, then a map would be far more useful. But since it's mostly just by country, then it actually gives off the wrong impression.
It feels a lot like how you'd represent it in a game or movie for emotional effect.