NSW COVID-19 Mapping

For anyone interested in getting a geospatial perspective of how NSW is tracking with managing the spread of COVID-19 infections, there is an online Dashboard showing data at a local government level available.

I like a lot of things about this dashboard – it conveys a lot of information in a pretty accessible way. I was sent a link to it by an industry mailing list, so only have the link I have shared though. There are some critical things I don’t know about what I am seeing. It would be easy to make assumptions, but they are just assumptions given that I do not have any way of confirming them.

Information I do NOT have, that I think is important were I to be relying on anything I see in this Dashboard, includes:

• How are the data on cases being updated?
• Where is the data being sourced from?
  • There is a reference to NSWHealth – that is a recognisable reference to most NSW citizens
  • There is a reference to JHU – once I thought about it for a second, I realised this was probably John’s Hopkins University. Maybe?

The other thing that is tricky with such comprehensive dashboards is that they are hard to work with on smaller screens. If you are already familiar with the platform it is built on, you have a better chance of being able to use it in a constrained space but it is still hard. The makers of this dashboard have added the small ‘maximise’ cross to the top of each of the panels so that you can work with one widget at a time. This is one way of making a complex web-based dashboard more accessible across a range of screen sizes, which is nice to see.

Is there anything you particularly like or have noticed about this tool that has made you think about your data and how you present it?