About
Shelley Miller, with scientific support from Joanna Merckx, created a mosaic illustrating the impact on the 33 boroughs and associated cities of Montreal during the first 50 days of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning on April 1, 2020. In this 50 by 50 grid, each column represents a day of the pandemic. The first column corresponds to April 1, 2020, the second to April 2, and so on until May 20, 2020. Each borough has its own colour, and they are presented in alphabetical order from top to bottom (see the figure showing the colour chart). Each square represents the relative proportion of cases in a given territory in all of Montreal. The unit value of each square is 2%. Although the situation seems to evolve differently from one jurisdiction to another during the first 35 days of the pandemic, this is no longer the case toward the end of the graph, where the relative burden of the disease in each area appears to stabilize, even though the overall number of cases continued to increase sharply during this period.
To create this work, Shelley Miller collaborated with epidemiologist Joanna Merckx to gather data from the Direction régionale de santé publique de Montréal. They scaled the data for each borough and city to make it proportionate to each jurisdiction’s population. From there, they were able to determine the proportion of cases per jurisdiction for all of Montreal.
Shelley Miller was assisted by Boris Pintado, Noémie Baribeau, Jennifer Hamilton, Alexandre Gariépy. Special thanks to Saskia Siebrand.
