Pandemic Dashboards Win Followers in Search of Latest Covid Data

In 2019, the website of Public Health England (PHE) wasn’t exactly racking up the hits. People visited it occasionally for general public health information, or some key data insights. But it was not much compared to the 19 million hits the site now receives on a weekly basis, with spikes of 300,000 users hanging around on the website at 4 p.m. every day, waiting for the updated Covid-19 numbers to publish.

PHE is one of the hundreds of government departments that had to quickly learn how to present data to the public as Covid-19 spread from country to country across the globe. ...