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How to crunch covid-19 data
- The pandemic has caused global devastation comparable to the Spanish flu, distinguished primarily by the unprecedented volume of data utilized to track and mitigate spread.
- The Economist's data analysis and visualization became central to its pandemic coverage, directly informing and influencing policymakers.
- Data journalist James Francham developed a real-time mobility tracking method using Google Maps' "busyness indicator."
- Francham wrote a script to scrape data 150,000 times for 18 locations across 13 cities in 13 countries over one week.
- The resulting analysis, published in March 2020, revealed diverging global responses: Rome had initiated lockdowns while New York and London had not.
- The dataset's utility prompted Google to make mobility data openly available to the public within a week of the publication.
- The methodology was adopted into official government briefings within seven days of the article's release.
- The organization's data team frequently scrapes publicly available but unutilized sources to uncover hidden narrative arcs.
- One such scraping project required only 40 lines of code to generate a rich, previously unknown dataset.
- The "flatten the curve" chart was designed to illustrate the intended impacts of social distancing: delaying the epidemic peak and reducing its height.
- Editor Sasha Mostow adapted the original CDC diagram by removing the y-axis and labeling curves directly to simplify interpretation.
- Academic Drew Harris later refined the visualization by adding a line for healthcare system capacity.
- The chart became viral across TV news and government briefings, establishing data visualization as a primary communication tool for pandemic response.