Utilizing Open COVID-19 Data

Benjy Renton ‘21: Accessing, Visualizing, and Communicating Open COVID-19 Data

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a proliferation of datasets for public consumption, analysis and dissemination. At the beginning of the pandemic, the lack of a national dataset for key metrics led to the rise of open-source efforts such as the COVID Tracking Project and individual media outlets’ tracking datasets. In this talk, I will describe how I have accessed these datasets to publish visualizations key to understanding national and regional trends. Using crowdsourced projects and scientific examples, we will explore ways to effectively communicate concepts and help a wider (non-scientific) audience make sense of pandemic statistics.