The spatiotemporal dynamics of COVID-19 in Europe: time-series clustering maps 5 distinct trajectories to spatial patterns.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected Europe unevenly, with surges in infections and deaths fluctuating across different regions and time periods. Hyper-localised hotspots and staggered timelines created intense, asynchronous waves of infections and deaths that distort country-level and cumulative data, obscuring the pandemic's spatiotemporal dynamics through aggregation. Despite extensive research comparing states and analysing subnational variance within individual countries, the detailed subnational and transnational dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic across Europe as a whole have not been comprehensively described.