As per reliable reverse app engineer Jane Manchun Wong, Google Maps will soon add a new map layer titled ‘COVID-19 Info’ alongside the existing transit, traffic, and street view layers. You can see in the image below that the layer demarcates all the different states and countries, showing whether COVID-19 spread is increasing or decreasing in that region.
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) September 4, 2020 The COVID-19 data, as per the screenshots, is being sourced from Wikipedia, The New York Times, Johns Hopkins University, and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. As for the numbers appearing next to the location’s name, Google Maps says that it’s the number of new cases per 100,000 people (an average over 7 days) in that region. The COVID-19 spread seems to be increasing in Ukraine and decreasing in Poland, as per the tweet above. Since the company is utilizing data from India, we can expect the COVID-19 layer to be available in our country as well. It is the need of the hour and could possibly give users a quick look at whether the virus is spread faster in their state or not. India is currently registering over 70,000 new COVID-19 cases each day, which is the fastest-growing in the world. The feature is not live yet and there’s also no information on when we can expect the COVID-19 layer to show up in Google Maps.
