Coronavirus Map | BBC News

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Coronavirus Map

BBC News

BBC News
Visual Journalism Team

DATA ANALYSIS & DATA JOURNALISM
Will Dahlgreen, Alison Benjamin, John Walton

DESIGN
Irene de la Torre Arenas

DEVELOPMENT
Development by Scott Jarvis, Becky Rush, Shilpa Saraf

WORLD SERVICE
Ana Lucía González, Roberto Belo Rovella

Like many news outlets, at the beginning of March BBC News also started tracking the Coronavirus pandemic. I remember when the virus ‘became’ big news back at the end of February because I was on call that weekend. It was still an Asia located story and we thought it would be appropriate to have a map centred in the Pacific Ocean. That quickly changed in a matter of a few days.

That version of the map was later revisioned and updated in R. And it became part of the discussion around rates and choropleths (maps that have areas filled in proportion to a specific number). By the time we decided to build an interactive map tracking the virus, it was evident that the pandemic was going to reach all countries around the world and that one of the most appropriate type of visualization was bubble maps.

Our colleagues at BBC News – Jakarta had already prepared a bubble map with a table that represented the numbers around the world. The central team that I am part of wanted to build from it, and add more information while improving the user experience.

We wanted to include a dropdown to zoom to different regions. Add the number of deaths per country. Incorporate a tooltip to show more information. And although in the end it was not included, we also considered a time slider to see how the virus moved around the world.

First version of the Coronavirus Map for mobile – MVP

First version of the Coronavirus Map for desktop – MVP

Final version of the Coronavirus Map with different features added – MVP

The map had to be translations-friendly too. It had to be easy to translate to the different languages of the BBC News World Services. The Coronavirus Map and Table were the first two projects to be published in all the BBC World Service languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian… 40 languages in total.