The Software That’s Powering All the Coronavirus Dashboards

With roughly a zillion different sources out there for coronavirus information, experts and authorities are rapidly iterating on ways to best present useful information to the public. Are deaths spiking, or is the curve flattening? How is the virus moving around, and how can it be stymied? To collate all of this information, many groups are leaning on geographic information system (GIS) software. It’s often used by governments and large businesses that need to account for changes in the physical world, usually meaning disaster preparedness and mitigation, as well as monitoring public infrastructure, such as plotting the location of 911 calls.

Perhaps the most famous example is the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Dashboard, a website assembled by the university’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. In the upper-left corner, in blaring red type, is a running tally of confirmed cases worldwide (3,628,824 as of the afternoon of May 5). Below that, a morbid leaderboard of confirmed cases divided by country (the U.S. has a depressingly untouchable lead). Front and center in the dashboard is a heat map of cumulative cases across the globe. You can see which countries managed to contain the virus by the fact that they aren’t covered in bright red spheres (the U.S. is covered in them). Other modular bits of data—tables, key figures, graphs—are peppered throughout the interface.