The chief scientist of the World Health Organization, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, said in an interview to The Hindu that “data is key to the control of this pandemic”. Indeed, in the weeks since the COVID-19 outbreak , the use of the terms, “exponential growth”, “flattening the curve”, “testing rates”, etc. have risen exponentially in the public domain, thanks largely to robust data-driven reporting.
Daily graphs of the novel coronavirus spread across countries in terms of the number of cases, the fatalities caused and testing rates, based on data diligently collected and provided in an open source format by Johns Hopkins University (and the WHO of course) have helped us understand the comparative effects of the strategies used by different countries.
Interactive map of confirmed coronavirus cases in India | State-wise tracker for coronavirus cases, deaths and testing rates
In The Hindu , we have tried to mirror some of the work done by other data journalists in newspapers such as Financial Times by trying to understand the spread of the virus and its effect in India’s States. Unlike national data, provincial and State data is not easy to come by. The Indian Council of Medical Research provides us with nationwide data, and the Ministry of Health’s daily totals seem to lag the actual number of cases.
Updates from States
The Hindu (apart from volunteer-run trackers such as covid19india.org) has tried to address this by relying on our reporter network, who provide updates from various States (and their health departments), which have been recorded daily in a spreadsheet maintained by our Internet desk. The spreadsheet has acted as the basis of two online live stories — one featuring a map that shows the State-wise cumulative number of cases , active infections, recoveries and deaths; and the other, a State-wise tracker that shows case progression, increase in fatalities over time, besides comparing testing rates and positive rates for the States. Except for Telangana, this information is available for all major States and Union Territories on a regular basis. The article featuring the interactive map is the most-read article on the paper’s website in the last three months with nearly 2.9 million page views, showing how readers have valued this information.
These two web-based “live” articles, besides a number of data-driven visualisation stories featured on the Op-Ed page (as Datapoint ) have helped us understand the Indian story of the COVID-19 spread. One area where we could do better is in covering the economic impact of the COVID-19 outbreak and the resultant lockdown in India, besides trying to understand whether our test protocols and systems are indeed able to identify, isolate and treat those infected by COVID-19.
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Unlike more developed countries such as the U.S., where data on unemployment claims have been a strong resource to understand the direct economic effect, we have to use only limited surveys (such as the CMIE’s unemployment survey). India has a relatively robust statistical infrastructure among developing countries, but we could do much better in allowing for availability of data in easy machine-readable formats, besides regular releases of national sample surveys.
The importance of data journalism in a world suffering from an “infodemic” has never been lost to me, but its vitality has been reaffirmed during this pandemic.
