The entire world is under a lockdown.
Unprecedented measures, aiming to combat a disease we have never seen before.
In such conditions of isolation, few resources have proven to be as indispensable as the
data collected and provided by the John Hopkins University.
This is a dashboard most of us have been opening very frequently in the last few months.
And its rise in popularity is no coincidence.
It happened for several key reasons.
First.
At times like these, we need a single source of truth.
Various media and news outlets globally use the John Hopkins Dashboards as the main source
of their reporting, which absolutely benefits society at large as it ensures that both decision-makers
and their communities have access to the same source of information.
Without a single source of truth, the reporting of COVID-19’s spread could have resembled
a broken telephone game, and may have had dangerous consequences.
Second.
A well-crafted dashboard is able to fit a great deal of information on one page, and
be meaningfully used even by people with no technical background.
The visuals and graphics we see here are pretty much self-explanatory, right?
On the left, we have the total number of confirmed cases globally and a breakdown by country.
If I click on any of these territories, the rest of the dashboard information will be
updated and filtered accordingly.
This is what makes the dashboard tool fairly straightforward to use by non-technical users.
Almost anyone can slice and dice the data at will, which is also one of the key advantages
of all dashboards in general.
Okay, so with a few clicks we can see the trend of confirmed cases in different countries
and even a non-expert can make their own conclusions regarding the current situation – ‘whether
our collective efforts as a society were able to flatten the curve or not’.
We can see how countries that reacted later – or didn’t react at all – fare against
the ones that were very cautious.
So… the curve at the bottom right corner of the page takes shape depending on the country
we have selected.
And please bear in mind that we can see three possible types of data ‘confirmed cases’,
‘logarithmic’, and ‘daily cases’.
Let’s make a few selections and compare the number of new daily cases in the US and
in Italy as of the end of April.
We can see that Italy is a significantly ahead in terms of flattening and perhaps squashing
the curve, but also that the US shows promising signs heading in the right direction at the
moment.
And we can continue further.
Some countries like Russia…, Brazil…, and India aren’t quite there yet, but we
can still see that newly confirmed cases have started to decrease, and this really gives
hope that the economy will reopen and things would continue as they were before.
Such data has become one of the main drivers of political decision making and politicians’
ability to communicate the importance of unpopular measures.
By being on the same page and realizing how serious this virus is, we are able to accept
the difficult decisions that had to be made collectively – after all nobody really wants
to stay at home and potentially lose their job.
The day-by-day development of the dashboard showed us that the spread of this disease
was truly unprecedented and how it became a global problem in a very short period of
time.
The constant spread and growth of the bubbles in red on the world map gave most people a
sense of urgency and effectively helped us realize that this is a serious issue.
Something else is worth discussing as well.
While the data in the dashboard is certainly useful for political and community leaders,
and medical personnel, the John Hopkins University dashboard is also incredibly informative for
investment professionals.
For example, investment professionals monitor the COVID 19 situation very carefully and
build their expectations regarding the re-opening of the economy based on the number of new
cases reported in a given country and on the rate with which new cases are declining or
rising compared to previous days.
The so-called “flattening and the squashing of the curve” will have a very important
effect on both the stock market and on some commodities such as oil.
So, in these cases the John Hopkins University dashboard is an invaluable tool that helps
institutional and retail investors price assets under a situation of distress.
In fact, we’re almost certain that the recent positive performances of the S&P 500 are significantly
impacted by the fact that newly reported daily cases chart appears to be heading downwards.
It is also worth noting that for the first time in history an entire generation opens
the same graphic –or dashboard, in this case – on a daily bases.
In fact, at the peak of this situation (so far), the John Hopkins dashboard received
more than 1 billion hits per day, which is truly incredible.
This is a website that was originally intended to inform only the research community, but
the general public took notice and started using it on a massive scale.
We believe that this highlights the usefulness of dashboards and will accelerate their adoption
in the years to come.
And while Tableau and Power BI already had solid adoption in the business world before
the COVID-19 lockdown, it’s reasonable to also expect that dashboard tools in general
will now grow in popularity at a much faster pace and will shape the future of data reporting.
After all, by using the John Hopkins dashboard one can easily imagine that there are many
possible applications of dashboards beyond the healthcare field – political results
and polling, data related to the stock market, internal corporation-specific dashboards allowing
executives to examine their firm at a glance, results from sport games, and so on and so
forth, right?
Finally, although these data, in particular, can be overwhelming at this stage, we hope
that you, like us, enjoy working with data nonetheless.
As a gift for everyone looking to improve their dashboarding skills and learn about
data visualization, we are excited to give you free access to our Introductory course
on Tableau -- that’s one of the world’s leading dashboarding software and an indispensable
skill to have nowadays!
Just follow the link in the description to claim your free course 😉
And in conclusion, we wanted to share with you that the source dataset for the John Hopkins
dashboard is hosted on GitHub, and has gained massive popularity by being “starred”
more than 21,000 times, with 1,200 reported issues, and 244 pull requests.
Why don’t you try to use that data and your newly acquired dashboarding skills and build
your own copy of the John Hopkins dashboard?