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Abstract—The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the forefront an unprecedented need for experts, as well as citizens, to visualize spatio-temporal disease surveillance data. Web application dashboards were quickly developed to fill t his g ap, b ut a ll of these dashboards supported a particular niche view of the pandemic (ie, current status or specific r egions). I n t his paper, we describe our work developing our COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard, which offers a unique view of the pandemic while also allowing users to focus on the details that interest them. From the beginning, our goal was to provide a simple visual tool for comparing, organizing, and tracking near-real-time surveillance data as the pandemic progresses. In developing this dashboard, we also identified 6 key metrics which we propose as a standard for the design and evaluation of real-time epidemic science dashboards. Our dashboard was one of the first r eleased t o the public, and continues to be actively visited. Our own group uses it to support federal, state and local public health authorities, and it is used by individuals worldwide to track the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, build their own dashboards, and support their organizations as they plan their responses to the pandemic.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
The Disappearance of COVID-19 Data Dashboards: The Case of Ephemeral Data
Data dashboards provide a means for sharing multiple data products at a glance and were ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data dashboards tracked global and country-specific statistics and provided cartographic visualizations of cases, deaths, vaccination rates and other metrics. We examined the role of geospatial data on COVID-19 dashboards in the form of maps, charts, and graphs. We organize our review of 193 COVID-19 dashboards by region and compare the accessibility and operationality of dashboards over time and the use of web maps and geospatial visualizations. We found that of the dashboards reviewed, only 17% included geospatial visualizations. We observe that many of the COVID-19 dashboards from our analysis are no longer accessible (66%) and consider the ephemeral nature of data and dashboards. We conclude that coordinated efforts and a call to action to ensure the standardization, storage, and maintenance of geospatial data for use on data dashboards and web maps are needed for long-term use, analyses, and monitoring to address current and future public health and other challenging issues.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1841520
- PAR ID:
- 10574335
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- MDPI
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2673-8112
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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