The pandemic emphasized the need for data scientists as nations and organizations took to creating their own COVID-19 dashboards for public health knowledge. Here are five key lessons that data dashboard developers learned throughout the pandemic, according to a March 23 Nature article.
- Before COVID-19 was brought to the public's attention, a team from Johns Hopkins inputted COVID-19 data manually, scrambling to find news from one-off announcements and social media posts. Very quickly, they learned that there should be a standardized way in which public health data is collected and shared publicly.
- Racial and ethnic data categories also proved difficult to track given the difference between state's and nation's policies as well as the different racial and ethnic categories themselves. Differences in racial data collection created a lapse in knowledge of how the virus was affecting different groups.
- The key theme to communicating complex public health data was distilling the information in a clear and simple manner. Data scientists learned how to make their graphs easy to understand, focusing on the wording of titles and bars in a way that would reach the most people.
- Researchers experimented with a variety of data visualization techniques during the pandemic. One team working on the UK COVID-19 dashboard would regularly test presenting the same data in different ways, analyzing which types had the most engagement.
- Data scientists also learned that building trust was critical to the success of communication, with them letting the public know the source of their data and openly teaching people about the methodology.