Data dashboards have been an important part of pandemic response and planning. What have their developers learned?

Lessons from the COVID data wizards Nature - Data dashboards have been an important part of pandemic response and planning. What have their developers learnt about communicating science in a crisis? Peeples, Lynne nature

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COVID-19 dashboards mushroomed around the world in 2020 as data scientists and journalists shifted their work to tracking and presenting information on the pandemic — from infection and death rates, to vaccination data and other variables. “You didn’t have any data set before that was so essential to how you plan your life,” says Lisa Charlotte Muth, a data designer and blogger at Datawrapper, a Berlin-based company that helps newsrooms and journalists to enrich their reporting with embeddable charts. “The weather, maybe, was the closest thing you could compare it to.” The growth in the service’s popularity was impressive. In January 2020 — before the pandemic — Datawrapper had 260 million chart views on its clients’ websites. By April that year, that monthly figure had shot up to more than 4.7 billion.

Policymakers, too, have leaned on COVID-19 data dashboards and charts to guide important decisions. And they had hundreds of local and global examples to reference, including academic enterprises such as the Coronavirus Resource Center, as well as government websites and news-media projects. ...