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Sunday 29 March 2020

Briefly Reviewed: National Coronavirus Information Design on Twitter


I can't think of another occasion where literally every country on the planet has cause to publicly report the same grim information, every single day. The Olympics come close, I guess.

At first I only followed the UK and Scottish virus tweets, but after seeing a tweet from Kuwait with a wildly different design, I wondered what other countries were doing. What can I say? Coronavirus intersects with everything we do and everything we're interested in – and in my case, it's information design.

So, let's take a spin around the globe:
🇬🇧 The UK has an impeccably-designed infographic that simply repeats the tweet text, which is good for accessibility, but provides little additional insight. Oddly, it emphasises the number of negative tests over positive – not very useful without knowing the rate of testing. Then there's the use of "... have sadly died" which attempts to convey sympathy but feels poorly constructed and out of place.

🇮🇹 Italy doesn't provide any information.

🇮🇪 Ireland has no infographic, just the stats.

🇰🇼 Kuwait goes all-in with a specially-designed bilingual infographic, with active, recovered, new and total cases, along with those discharged from quarantine and still in ICU. I don't love the layout but it's still very impressive.

🇮🇱 Israel also has an infographic packed with data; but it's completely inaccessible, with zero information in the tweet text. Also, the infographic appears to be a low-res screenshot of a PDF from an iOS device.

🇰🇷 South Korea isn't much better. The tweet text is different from what's in the infographic, which itself is a poorly-cropped screenshot.

🇹🇼 Taiwan provides the crucial new case numbers in the tweet text, with the infographic detailing their origin (largely imported) and status.

🇺🇾 Uruguay keeps it simple with all the information in the text. The infographic is just for the date.

🇧🇷 Brazil combines an overview in the tweet text with a comprehensive infographic that packs a lot in.

In the US and Canada, reporting is done at the state and province-level:

 British Columbia also keeps it simple, with a typical embedded link. Unfortunately the feature image isn't very relevant.

California is very much on the same lines, but with a generic update image.

As the pandemic has progressed, the impact of daily updates has diminished, even as the numbers grow higher and higher. We've all now moved onto dedicated tracker websites with exponential and logarithm graphs and doubling times. But there's still a place for these official updates, and it's a fascinating window into the priorities of health authorities around the world.
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