Artist, epidemiologist team up to create mural inspired by Montreal's COVID-19 data

A new mural outside CEGEPduVieux Montralhighlights theseverity of the first wave of the pandemic in Montreal, using datato visualize how each borough was affected.

It was created over the span of three months by artist Shelley Miller and epidemiologist JoannaMerckx,an affiliate member in the department ofepidemiologyat McGill University and the director of Medical Affairs bioMrieux.

"It was a very interesting, also challenging, but also very nice experience to team up with an artist," saidMerckx.

The mural is a grid explaining the first 50 days of the outbreak in Montreal, broken down into 50 different squares for the boroughs and demerged cities.

"A lot of the work that I do references patchwork and quilting, so the square motif is something that I've worked with a lot," said Miller.

"In the first wave we heard about a lot of boroughs most affected and hardest hit. I wanted to look at the data in a different way to see if there was a way to visualize how each borough compared in terms of population density."

Bringing data to new audiences

Each borough or city was given adifferent colour and organized alphabetically from the top down. Each square, Miller explained, represents "a rounded figure of two per cent of the cases per thousand based on the population density of the borough."

The mural is part of the CovidArt program sponsored by Rcherche Qubec. Artists were asked to collaborate with a scientist or researcher to create new public art around the theme of COVID-19.

Merckxjoined Miller to help interpret the data. She said art can illustrate COVID-19 numbers in a way spreadsheets never can and can also bringthat data tonew audiences.

"What I hope is that we kind of canremember how we lived that first wave, and that we will notforget but that we also can learn and we can do things better in the second wave."