Data Vis Dispatch,
December 14

Let’s start gently — say, with sports:

Or maps looking forward to snow on Christmas:

But all right, those weren’t the big stories of this week. That title belongs, again, to the spread of the omicron variant and the efforts to understand what makes it different:

The New Statesman informed us that the UK has regained its dubious title of G7 country with the highest COVID case rate. It remains to be seen how existing immunity, the ongoing booster campaign, and other measures will hold up in the current wave — or how the NHS will make it through the second pandemic winter:

Around the world, the hope is that vaccination will make this wave of disease less deadly, even as distribution challenges persist:

Finally, a huge number of charts this week focused on the economic troubles of the COVID era. Tourism is down and inflation is up:

Freight is slow by sea and expensive by air:

And no one wants to predict what’s going on with employment:

Meanwhile the political section will be brief this week, with charts of party divisions in the US and Switzerland:

A string of deadly tornadoes hit the US on Friday:

Finally, other topics included demographics in Germany, housing in Singapore, and the racial geography of Chicago: