Ginnetho Boateng

Hi! My name is Ginnetho Boateng and I am a first-year student at Macalester College from Ghana, West Africa. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has really interested for sometime and taking this Medical Geography course has taught me a lot about the virus and other intriguing infectious diseases as well as the effort countries put in order to control such pandemics overtime.

Here's an excerpt of my Pandemic Journal below:

Week 1

"The novel coronavirus pandemic has brought new perspectives on the geographical context of health and diseases in our world as we now see how disease burden affects the morbidity and mortality of cohort populations with respect to their environments. In addition, this pandemic shows how the spatial and geographical distribution of a disease is subjected to change within its respective environment as the incidence, the intensity, the fatality, and the prevalence of diseases always vary from place to place."

Week 2

"The use of geographic data through infographics and other interactive maps in GIS has revolutionized our approach to tackling diseases and it is evident that many organizations have adopted this system in order to provide insights on disease trends, patterns and relationships. This GIS community has become very valuable in the COVID-19 pandemic because it has provided an effective communication of data to the public and it has also aided governments and policy makers undertake crucial decision making in order to effectively control the spread the coronavirus as well as to allocate sufficient resources to cohort populations. Location intelligence companies that pioneer the use of GIS software have become more important than ever in the COVID-19 pandemic as they have aided in making communities effectively respond to the disease."