15 data tools to inspire and inform your COVID-19 solutions coverage
Journalists rely on data to confirm and inform key aspects of their reporting, often focusing on the worst performers in a given dataset and overlooking positive deviants — the people, businesses, organizations and lawmakers who are innovating creative responses to tackle their community’s toughest challenges.
In this COVID-19 era of reporting, many journalists say they cannot write or produce a story on the novel coronavirus without incorporating its traumatic effects. Yet journalists — and their audiences — also know that progress is being made and want to see that reflected in news coverage. Datasets can be a good place to start.
A while back, we shared 17 databases you can use in your solutions reporting. That list remains a handy resource. And we’ve now aggregated an additional 15 databases and other resources that are tracking various aspects of COVID-19’s billowing sweep around the world, providing detailed analysis of the problems while also hinting at what’s working and where. Over time, this data will help reveal who’s making progress, and what might be learned from it.
To learn more about how to find, vet and use data in your solutions journalism reporting, read Vetting the Goods: Four tips on how to assess evidence for COVID-19 solutions stories, and check out the recordings (posted in that article) of two informative webinars hosted by my SJN colleagues.
Tracking cases and deaths by location
1. The epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. is in New York, and Coronavirus in New York City: Tracking the spread of the pandemic is a data project by The City publication documenting the number of tests, confirmed cases and deaths there. The numbers are broken down by borough, with comparisons to New York State and the United States. The data is available on Github.
2. The New York Times maintains an interactive dashboard, updated daily: Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count. The data is available to download on Github.
3. The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic, collects data from every U.S. state and territory on the number of positive and negative tests, hospitalizations, deaths, patients in ICU, the number of ventilators in use and the total test results. The data is easy to navigate and is searchable by state.
4. The World Health Organization regularly updates an interactive web-based COVID-19 Dashboard documenting the number of new cases, confirmed cases and deaths from around the world.
5. The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University has created the 2019 Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 Data Repository on Github, pulling data from 27 global health, government and news organizations to track and visualize in real-time the number of reported COVID-19 cases.
Tracking cases and deaths by race and ethnicity
6. Until early April, many jurisdictions were not releasing information on the race and ethnicity of those tested positive for and killed by COVID-19. The public outcry was pronounced, and the list of holdouts among states and municipalities is shrinking. The Solutions Journalism Network curates and updates a collection of more than 140 state and local datasets that include the race and ethnicity of people diagnosed with COVID-19, as well as those who have died from the virus.
7. The COVID Racial Data Tracker is a newly launched collaboration between the COVID Tracking Project and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. The dataset is a compilation of racial and ethnic data for COVID-19 cases in every state. The data is presented as a web version and CSV files.
Tracking cases and deaths in prisons
8. The Marshall Project is tracking COVID-19 cases in state and federal prisons in their State-by-State Look at Coronavirus in Prisons, a searchable database that documents prisoner and staff cases and deaths. The raw data is available to download on Data World and Github.
Tracking the pandemic’s impact beyond cases and deaths
9. Facebook Data for Good has several visualization dashboards and maps to track COVID-19 symptoms, disease prevention, high-resolution population density maps and a social connectedness index. A CrowdTangle Live Display makes it easy to see how global health organizations, politicians, media outlets and nonprofits are sharing information about COVID-19 on social media. These displays are searchable by country.
10. Big Local News, a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative, has collected a wealth of COVID-19 data on topics ranging from school meals to Twitter data to hospital finance and hospital staffing. To access it on the organization’s beta website, make sure you’re logged into Google (the site uses your Google login to give you access), and then click on “Open Projects” in the navigation bar on the left.
11. The COVID-19 Mobility Data Network is a consortium made up of infectious disease epidemiologists at universities and technology companies around the world. Two visualization tools that are available to journalists track the effectiveness of social distancing and movement range data to analyze people’s behavior outside their homes since Feb. 29. The data repositories are not readily available online, but a media contact email is provided.
12. Open ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, features a COVID-19 Data Repository for studies, research and data. Of the five studies in the database, three focus on mental health, sleep quality and fatigue among health care workers.
Data-related resources
13. DataJournalism.com has a lot of resources for journalists, including long-reads about using data in COVID-19 reporting. One article of particular use may be Reporting Beyond the Case Numbers: How to Brainstorm COVID-19 Data Story Ideas.
14. The Sense About Science U.S. chapter helps journalists with questions about studies and statistics. Fill out a short form, ask your question, and someone will respond to you (usually) by the end of the day.
15. Explain COVID is an initiative of researchers and students from multiple U.S. universities which provides concise and research-based answers to common COVID-19 questions.
Holly Wise is Texas region manager for the Solutions Journalism Network, a senior lecturer at Texas State University and a former Fulbright Scholar in India.
See the COVID-19 section of The Whole Story, the Solutions Journalism Network’s Medium blog, for more resources, including how to report solutions stories from home, 24 questions to jump-start your solutions story and how news collaboratives are working together to bolster their COVID-19 coverage.
The Solutions Story Tracker, a curated repository of 9,000 solutions journalism stories from nearly 1,200 news outlets, has nearly 500 stories on responses to COVID-19. You can republish some of these stories for free as part of the SoJo Exchange.
