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The power of effective visualizations for pandemic storytelling

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Matthew Mayo

, KDnuggets.

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Data is necessary for our understanding of the world, and particularly for the emergence of phenomena such as the COVID-19 outbreak. A viral pandemic is not a scenario in which intuition can provide a sense of how the spread is advancing, nor are feelings a sufficient approach to dealing with and ultimately defeating such an unseen enemy. Collecting, analyzing, sharing, and ultimately making use of data is what is needed.

This collected data needs to be efficiently conveyed to all sorts of individuals and groups, from lay people to experts and everything in between. Visualizing collected data can make its dissemination easy, and can help others understand quickly what has taken others so long to collect and analyze. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I'm not an epidemiologist, and I have no interest in pretending to be one; there's enough of that going on right now. What I can do, however, is help bring to our readers some examples of great data visualizations in the time COVID-19, which is what I hope to do today.

John Burn-Murdoch

 works on data visualization (or, as his Twitter bio says, "Stories, stats & scatterplots") for the Financial Times. He has recently garnered a following and appreciation for his COVID-19 visualizations, which are exemplars of how quality data visualizations can clearly and succinctly tell a story. Personally, I have been relying on John's visualizations to understand the outbreak for the past couple of weeks, and generally refer them several times a day.

Though he seems to be adding additional visualizations to his daily repertoire as the outbreak progresses (and as additional data becomes available to do so), currently John produces the following visuals on a daily basis:

• Coronavirus mortality trajectories tracker for major countries
• Coronavirus mortality trajectories tracker for individual major countries, compared
• Coronavirus mortality trajectories in subnational regions
• Coronavirus case trajectories for major countries
• Coronavirus case trajectories for individual major countries, compared

If you want to get an idea of how great data visualizations can help us understand the underlying data, and succinctly convey a story, have a look at John's Coronavirus case trajectories for major countries visualization from March 26, 2020 — which charts the cumulative number of confirmed cases, by number of days since 100th case — from which much can be immediately gleaned.