A picture is worth a thousand words! Data Visualization proves this proverb correct in so many ways. It is always more impactful to see a beautiful and crisp visualization of a data set rather than reads pages and pages about that same data. And this is even more true for COVID-19. A red line steadily going upwards depicting the increasing cases of Coronavirus in a country is much more alarming and impactful rather than just reading about it.
And so there are many universities and tech companies that are providing data visualization dashboards of COVID-29. These dashboards provide information on everything about the disease ranging from the number of confirmed cases in countries, the current death toll, the rate at which the cases are in reading, etc.
Currently, websites of the World Health Organisation, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, etc. provide the most accurate information about COVID-29 symptoms, prevention methods, common treatments, current statistics, etc. However, dynamic data visualization dashboards are much more impactful and detailed. So let’s check out some of the most accurate and impactful data visualization dashboards across the world.
1. Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard
Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. They built a live COVID-19 dashboard with data sourced from various places like the World Health Organization, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, various social media outlets and different health and media departments around the world. This data is collected and published on GitHub after which the dashboard and data visualizations are created using Esri’s ArcGIS platform. Esri is a Californian company that provides Geographic Information System (GIS) software, and applications for geographical database management.
2. USA Center for Disease Control COVID-19 Dashboard
The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s dashboard provides a detailed report about the spread of Coronavirus, primarily from their own data. This dashboard is more about the cases in the United States of America rather than the world and it provides data visualizations on various COVID-19 criteria such as Cases & Deaths by State in the USA using a heatmap, New Cases by Day using a time chart and Cases by Age, Cases by Race, Cases by Ethnicity, using bar graphs. However, one issue about this dashboard is that it doesn’t update the data as frequently as compared to other dashboards which are a must in this highly dynamic situation.
3. Microsoft Bing COVID-19 Dashboard
Bing is a web search engine that was created by Microsoft. The Microsoft Bing COVID-19 Dashboard is a basic tracker for the Coronavirus situation. This tracker contains data from various trusted sources such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), etc. This dashboard is quite mobile-friendly while other dashboards are mostly suited to desktops. Another great thing is that you can see all the COVID-19 statistics on the Microsoft Bing COVID-19 Dashboard and click on each individual country to provide details of all the news reports on Coronavirus in that country.
4. World Health Organization COVID-19 Dashboard
The World Health Organization COVID-19 Dashboard provides a detailed report about the spread of Coronavirus, primarily from their own data. An advantage of this dashboard is that it has a minimalist surface, with a world map showing the number of cases using bubbles. You can hover over each individual country to determine the number of confirmed cases and deaths till now. The WHO Dashboard also has timeline graphs for confirmed cases over time and deaths over time along with a case comparison of WHO areas Americas, Europe, Eastern Mediterranean, Western Pacific, South East Asia, and Africa. However, one disadvantage of this dashboard is that it doesn’t update the data as frequently, just like the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s dashboard.
5. The New York Times COVID-19 Dashboard
The New York Times has a COVID-19 webpage that tracks the global outbreak numbers for this epidemic. This webpage displays several graphs from publicly available data about COVID-19 obtained from the World Health Organization, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, etc. These graphs include a global map of the number of worldwide cases, the number of deaths, a heat map with the number of cases per capita, and the COVID-19 hotspots in the world. The site also contains a line graph of the cases for all countries in the world divided by Where new cases are increasing, Where new cases are mostly the same and Where new cases are decreasing. In addition to this, the emphasis on the number of cases in the USA is greater as the number of known Coronavirus cases there is growing quickly.
