Charting the COVID spread revisited

Four years ago today, when I was still working at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) , we published a story that became the biggest "hit" in the history of ABC online. Charting the COVID-19 spread in Australia would go on to amass 33.5 million page views and 134 million engaged minutes (audience attention) over its two-and-a-half-year lifespan.

I'm writing about it today because I don't think it received the recognition it deserved at the time. And it was a brilliant piece of technical journalism, even if I say so myself. And yes there were others like this, but no other domestic publication could have matched the reach and impact of this article because it was published by the ABC.

At the start of the pandemic, governments were very slow to publish COVID data and what they produced was not standardised. So each state released a version of its own health information. There was no centralised source.

The ABC Digital Story Innovation team began collecting data from each state and territory health authority and arranging it in a standardised order in a spreadsheet. And when daily information started flowing from the Federal Government, that too was fed in.

We drew on our expertise as explanatory storytellers to break down difficult concepts such as logarithmic scales, growth factors, and "flattening the curve", using measured words and an extensive range of data visualisation techniques including animated charts, multimedia timelines, and bespoke animated graphics.

By March 17, we had enough data to publish the first take of the story with eight charts linked to the spreadsheets which gave a “live” perspective on the state of the pandemic including data on case numbers, deaths, testing, hospitalisation, etc.

But because we were now getting a daily flow of data, the spreadsheet had to be updated several times a day, seven days a week. And the article needed to be updated as soon as the new information came to hand. In addition, our developer Nathanael Scott, created a way to update the data directly via the spreadsheet, effectively bypassing the CMS which would have slowed things down. This hack did not just update the graphs, it also adjusted a set of customised sentences to reflect the latest information.

To keep the article dynamic, from time to time we would jump back into the article and create new graphs and charts, add new words, explain new developments and swap around the order of the sections to highlight the most interesting trend. And it went on like this for almost 30 months!

In 2020, Charting the Spread was the No. 1 article in terms of page views on the ABC News website (and app) with 28 million views. In 2021, it was the No. 2 article with 3.3 million page views. (Another similar article we produced on COVID vaccination stats was No. 1 that year with 9.8 million page views and 45.6 million engaged minutes.) And in 2022, it was the No. 3 article with 2 million views.

I can't see that record being broken unless, God forbid, something more cataclysmic befalls us. But it's not just about the stats. I believe we were able to provide transparency, real-time analysis and eventually hope to a massive audience of Australians during this unprecedented public health crisis.

The team behind this amazing project was: Inga Ting , Nathanael Scott , Alex Palmer, Mark Doman , Michael Workman , Katia S. , and me with assistance in the later stages from other colleagues.