In a global outbreak such as COVID-19, visualization is extremely important, since that promotes scientific understanding based on the available data, even if the general population lacks expert knowledge.
Some tools help in visualizing phylogenetic relationships of viruses based on their mutation patterns. However, merely associating phylogenies with time cannot enable full understanding of the geographical spread. Therefore, we proposed a method to associate phylogenies with both time and space, and combine them into a single three-dimensional graph.
We applied this method to visualize the phylogeny of SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 to understand their temporal and geographic spread. We subsequently generated a video to understand the spread of SARS-CoV-2 based on our system.
