With the current situation of the world, there is nothing that resonates with the theme “viral” like the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 does. The digital era we live in, provides us with a lot of information about COVID-19. There are a lot of dashboards that have been built that track the current status of the world with respect to the number of active cases, number of recoveries and the number of fatalities. There are various blogs and bulletins that provide updates about the events taking place all over the world to combat this virus. However, I did not find a single source that provides both these important pieces of information in conjunction.
The objective of the visuals is to provide information about the number of confirmed cases in conjunction with the notable measures that have been taken the World Health Organization (WHO) and different countries respectively. The visuals should help the viewer answer questions like: i. What was the state of the world when a particular event occurred, for instance “what was the state of the world when WHO officially declared COVID-19 a Pandemic”? ii. What has the disease progression been like after a certain event occurred, for instance “have the number of confirmed cases increased after India issued a lockdown”?
Adobe Illustrator was used to create a static visual that shows the spread and response of COVID-19 within the first 100 days. Day 0 is 31st December, 2019. This is when China reported a pneumonia of unknown cause to the WHO. D3.js was used to create an interactive visual, that shows the progression of COVID-19 and the world’s response to it. Although 31st December, 2019 is Day 0, the data is collection process did not start until 22nd January, 2020.
The dataset provided by John Hopkins University is used to build these visuals. Here is the link to the data file used. It contains the geographical information like Province, Country, Latitude and Longitude and each date exists as a column in the table. This file is updated every midnight by adding a new column for the date. Hence the file URL is used to connect with the data instead of downloading and using a static copy.