Sunday, June 07, 2020

A tale of two Toronto maps

There's a nice juxtaposition of two maps of Toronto in this weekend's Globe and Mail.
One map shows the areas of the city most and least affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the other is a map of the median household income by area. The two maps are almost are almost identical (or rather inverse images, with the areas with the most cases of the coronavirus mapping very closely onto the poorest neighbourhoods).
It's almost uncanny, although perhaps not particularly surprising.

One other interesting thing arising from the map, and the analysis thereof, is that my own little area of The Beaches appears to have the lowest number of cases in the whole of Toronto, just 13, and also the lowest rate of infection (60 per 100,000). 
Yes, it's a reasonably wealthy area, although far from the wealthiest (I was surprised it made it into the top category on the map), and yes it's reasonably WASPy, although not as WASPy as it used to be. It's just a solid middle-class area, full of law-abiding, politically left-of-centre individuals. So, given the number of visitors we receive from other areas (especially since the weather turned nice, and given the number of seniors' homes (particularly along Kingston Road), I'm impressed that we have so few cases.

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