Google Maps updates with COVID-19 disease information layer

Google today announced an update to its Google Maps service, bringing users a new COVID-19 disease information layer to help everyone better understand the number of cases in specific areas. As the epidemic continues to spread in many parts of the world, many people are worried that the second wave of peaks will come again. After this App update, users can directly view case data (in units of 100,000) and rising and falling trends in various places on Google Maps, and can use colors to assess the severity of different regions.

The feature is now enabled for all 220 market areas currently supported by Google Maps, with data available down to the city level where possible (depending on the data Google can obtain).

The data sources are very wide, including Johns Hopkins, the New York Times, and Wikipedia aggregated from local government organizations, which is the same as the real-time COVID-19 statistics you see on the Google search engine.

The update has been pushed to Google Maps clients on Android and iOS this week, but some users may have to wait a few days to receive the update, and Google does not seem to have plans to introduce it to the desktop version.