2023-06-30 14:15:01
A pillar of the fight against the Covid-19 epidemic will die out on Friday, June 30, in media indifference. SI-Dep, for “screening information system”, hastily launched in the spring of 2020 to monitor the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, should be put in “hibernation”, as provided by law voted in July 2022.
A judgment which incidentally retires the eight Covid-19 monitoring pages published by Les Décodeurs du Monde during the three years of the pandemic.
The opportunity to return, through this making of, to the editorial and technical choices that were made in order to create, maintain and improve, over a large number of days, these articles which are very popular with readers.
A first dashboard that is incomplete and difficult to maintain
The very first painting, published on January 24, 2020.
The very first article from the Decoders offering a summary of the cases of “coronavirus”, then called “2019-nCov”, was published on January 24, 2020. It was then a simple table listing the countries where infections and deaths. But as the epidemic evolves and escapes from China, it appears to us that this treatment will not be enough.
The first “real” dashboard (or dashboard) debuts on February 27 and features a graph displaying the number of confirmed cases from the three then-active outbreaks (South Korea, Iran, and Italy), as well as a world map showing imported cases and active outbreaks. The update is automated in an online spreadsheet which is based on daily data published by the American Johns-Hopkins University (JHU), the monitoring of which very quickly becomes a world reference.
Some visuals from the first dashboard published on February 27, 2020. “THE WORLD”
It is subsequently enriched with several graphs and maps summarizing the evolution of the epidemic in France and around the world, including hospital data. But this first dashboard is gradually becoming unmanageable because it is too artisanal: it is only maintained by a single journalist and is based only on an online spreadsheet, which becomes a fragile house of cards of calculation formulas. In mid-April 2020, the first wave being at its peak, the decision is made to collectively build a more complete, more thoughtful and more ambitious follow-up page, both technically and editorially.
Create a long-term follow-up and reference
The objective is to offer a sustainable dashboard to readers, which implies that it is easy to maintain, that the flow of data is better managed and that its appearance uses visual codes adapted to monitoring the health crisis.
The opening of this project also comes at a time when health authorities are communicating their data in a more structured way, which they were unable to do at the start of confinement, when open data was confined to a daily conference where Jérôme Salomon, then director general of health, listed the number of new infections and new deaths.
On the technical side, the spreadsheet is abandoned: the data is managed by Python scripts “connected” directly to official sources. On the design side, this new dashboard is designed with the artistic direction of the newspaper in order to offer a simple, clear, airy and pleasant reading.
After three weeks of teleworking involving a dozen different people, the project was finally published on May 5, 2020, less than a week from the first deconfinement. A bit late ? This was our fear at the time of publication, quickly contradicted by the audience success… and, alas, by the following epidemic waves.
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But the work does not end once the article is published, a dashboard requiring continuous work of improvements and maintenance. The requirements are as technical (managing data flow failures, often reported by the most assiduous readers) as editorial. The challenge is in particular to change the choice of health indicators according to the epidemic context. For example, the number of people cured, a figure given by health authorities every evening in the spring of 2020, was included in the very first dashboard and in its successor, published in early May – it was later removed for lack of information. relevance. Later, at beginning of 2022, we have chosen to distinguish people hospitalized for Covid-19 from people with Covid-19 but hospitalized for another reason. The many feedback from readers, in comments or by e-mail, have also been a source of corrections and improvements.
Graphs and maps from the main dashboard dedicated to monitoring the Covid-19 pandemic. ” THE WORLD ”
Since May 5, 2020, the dashboard has been reposted 557 times, an average of once every two days, often to fix bugs, the rest of the time to modify, add or remove visuals or texts.
A dashboard can hide others
The number and variety of Covid-19 tracking data will quickly make it difficult to process them in a single dashboard. Other articles are therefore created as the pandemic progresses.
Two of them were born during the first confinement. The first, published on March 27, 2020, consists of visualizing the waves of infections in more than 100 countries, with a fairly immediate audience success, followed by a second, which offers from April 1 an equivalent comparison, but with the French departments.
Other monitoring pages are emerging as the State equips itself to manage the health crisis with new data, such as SI-Dep, which lists the results of screening tests for SARS-CoV-2, and which allows us to publish the incidence rate of Covid-19 in the general dashboard, but also a breakdown by department in mid-July.
The passing weeks and months allow us to better understand how our way of representing the epidemic can adapt and improve. The emergence of the second wave of Covid-19, in the fall, confronts us, for example, with the phenomenon of the ebb and flow of the virus, shifted according to regions or countries. Which leads us to mid-November 2020 to present the situation of the departments, classifying them according to the dynamics of the epidemic using an algorithm.
At the end of December 2020, another crucial phase begins: the French vaccination campaign. After two weeks of floating, the structured data is made available by the State services. The world think immediately about a specific follow-up. Blue is chosen to design the color palette of injections and reminders, in contrast to the tones ranging from yellow to red used to describe the epidemic and traditionally chosen to represent the notion of danger, but also because it seems more neutral than green, which is believed to have connotations. The vaccination dashboard is published on January 29 and runs at full speed throughout spring-summer 2021. A final “tracker” is added at the end of September 2021 to identify the different variants of SARS-CoV-2 and their distribution on French territory.
A format acclaimed by readers
Eight dashboards dedicated to Covid-19 have been produced in less than two years. These formats, updated automatically, responded to a demand for benchmarks from readers, all the more so as the situation was unstable and evolving, as evidenced by the audience figures. As of June 30, 2023, the main dashboard has had 31,288,996 unique visits in 1,152 days of existence, making it the most visited article – by far – in the history of the site. Monde. The first dashboard had recorded 6.76 million visits in just two months, and that of vaccination accumulated 5.67 million visits.
In total, the eight dashboards generated 59 million visits, or almost a fifth of the Decoders audience since the start of the pandemic. They also generated more than 1,850 comments from readers – not counting those sent to us by email or private message on social networks. It is much more than those of the majority of the articles of the Monde (40 comments on average in 2022).
Covid-19: the audiences of our monitoring pages
Weekly visits to four “trackers” of the Monde of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Premier dashboard
Dashboard of 100 countries
Dashboard principal
Dashboard vaccination
Source : AT Internet
The exploitation of data has been at the heart of Decoder practices since the creation of the service, but the work carried out during the pandemic has confirmed the editorial interest of medium and long-term monitoring. The “dashboard” format is currently available for subjects as varied as gas stocks in European countries, electricity production in France, the 2022 presidential campaign or even global warming.
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