New Data Visualization Depicts Global COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment
Graphicacy and IVAC expands VIEW-hub with new layers of vaccine data
In contrast to the stream of discouraging news brought on by the pandemic, the story of COVID-19 vaccines is largely one of success.
The International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tells that story through VIEW-hub, an interactive visualization of global vaccine data.
VIEW-hub has long mapped introductions, access, coverage, outcomes, and more for vaccines such as PCV, RV, and Hib. In 2021, the VIEW-hub team quickly mobilized to visualize the accelerated COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
Graphicacy’s ongoing work with IVAC on other aspects of VIEW-hub and the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center laid the groundwork for an intuitive vaccine visualization accessible for general audiences and experts around the world.
“Graphicacy takes a sentence we give them and makes something beautiful out of it,” VIEW-hub Project Coordinator Kirthini Muralidharan said. “I call them our fairy godparents. They take our ideas and make them reality, or even better.”
A big picture view for a bigger audience
The IVAC team added COVID-19 vaccine information rapidly thanks in large part to the Airtable database that Graphicacy developed the year before. The database provided a structure to stand up and populate new global maps with minimal developer interaction.
These dynamic maps indicate each nation’s current vaccine introduction status, current and planned vaccine products, vaccinated groups, vaccine program type, and universal vaccine introductions over time.
“Graphicacy set up such a great system, I can add a section of maps to VIEW-hub with only an hour of their time,” Muralidharan said. “Being able to do so much of this on our own saves us money we can put toward other projects.”
The COVID-19 vaccine maps became VIEW-hub’s biggest draw in short order: The first month they went live, the site logged a 252% increase in page hits. For IVAC, increased viewership means that the success story is getting out.
As of June 2021, the map indicating current vaccine introduction status is almost entirely green, which means at least one vaccine product has been introduced nearly worldwide and in a large majority of countries in WHO’s COVAX initiative aimed at equitable vaccine access (which VIEW-hub also tracks).
“These are big success stories,” Muralidharan said. “It’s a public health win that we had vaccines rolling out and getting into people within a year. It’s also a victory for COVAX — though while we’re getting more equitable, we need to keep doing better.”
VIEW-hub isn’t the only COVID-19 vaccine tracker, but according to Muralidharan, other visualizations layer vaccine coverage on top of vaccine introduction and muddy the waters by telling two stories in one. “Breaking those details up helps us see where we’re getting our wins and where we need to continue working,” she said.
Guiding policy decisions with greater detail
In addition to new maps displaying COVID-19 vaccine access, Graphicacy also helped develop a new card-based visualization on VIEW-hub comparing characteristics of the nine most widely-used COVID-19 vaccines globally. Public health departments worldwide can easily see the efficacy, approval status, cold chain requirements, and other key data points about each vaccine to make informed choices.
“We wanted to collate information to help decision makers understand what vaccines they could manage,” Muralidharan said. “Some don’t have the infrastructure for super low temperatures, for example.”
Further, Graphicacy developed another new section of VIEW-hub to collect and organize in-depth vaccine studies as they become available — providing yet another one-stop shop for researchers.
“We designed and developed a Sankey diagram, a new visualization type we haven’t yet used on VIEW-hub,” Graphicacy Senior Designer Carni Klirs said, “but infrastructure we already had in place allowed us to quickly try new techniques for displaying the vaccine data.”
With that flexibility, IVAC continues to realize returns on the VIEW-hub redesign Graphicacy led in 2020.
“We didn’t have to start from scratch,” Muralidharan said. “Because we had a sketch to build on, we could show our partners that we were already tracking vaccines. That goes back to Graphicacy thinking three steps ahead to give us a beautiful product and a tool we can update ourselves.”
Graphicacy partners with clients to tell engaging stories with data. Graphicacy’s team combines storytelling, thoughtful human-centered design and deep technical capabilities to build and deploy strategic, data-rich digital projects. Graphicacy’s team has created data visualizations and infographics for top-tier organizations and companies, domestically and internationally, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the World Bank, the Center for American Progress, the Anti-Defamation League and many others.
