Gotcha. Reading that proposal it appears to be a proposal for a
methodology that will enable future proposals; where are the future
proposals?

Well, so the geo cube has to guess a bit at who would find it useful in the future.
 
It also says "in many countries, disease monitoring must be
carried out at the state or metro-area level" - which countries have
to be metro-level? Who are we risking the entire reader population
for, here? Is it one country, or ten, or?

For what it's worth I love the idea of this kind of live stream. But I
want to make sure that how the various chunks are being prioritised,
and how critical they are to the outside world, is correlated - and is
correlated with the underlying data's sensitivity, at that. If we're
introducing risks by going down to city level and the actual use cases
for city level data are limited, let's not do that - but this proposal
doesn't provide thoughts on how limited those use cases are. It just
says that it's required in some countries.

I agree with you, but I'm not sure the data is risky if it's k-anonymous.  Most likely, just doing that will limit the countries for which metro level data is available.