Lessons from the COVID data wizards

Data dashboards have been an important part of pandemic response and planning. What have their developers learnt about communicating science in a crisis?

In March 2020, Beth Blauer started hearing anecdotally that COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting Black people in the United States. But the numbers to confirm that disparity were “very limited”, says Blauer, a data and public-policy specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. So, her team, which had developed one of the most popular tools for tracking the spread of COVID-19 around the world, added a new graphic to their website: a colour-coded map tracking which US states were — and were not — sharing infection and death data broken down by race and ethnicity. [continue at Nature]