Vaccination journey

With vaccinations now leading the daily news coverage of COVID-19, I decided to focus on some positive data, a better alternative to reading the 'worsening news'. Using the XYZ framework which underpins MAPP, we have built an open app that visualises vaccination rates across the world.

13th April 2021 • Team Thoughts

Back in March 2020, when I stayed home for good, one of my most frequented websites was Coronavirus section of worldometers.info. Not because I liked it. Things as obvious as air were disappearing one by one and I was being transported into a new world with little in sight. Anything could happen from then on and I could merely look for answers in literature. Albert Camus possibly. I would scroll endless pandemic news and check on newly updated figures. News would only be bad or worse and I no longer called it ‘bad news’. It was ‘worsening news’. Back then numbers of new Covid-19 cases would go into hundreds in most affected areas of the globe and it seemed like a lot. I had no idea where we were heading and each glance on fresh stats brought me strange relief.

Empty Piccadilly Circus on April 10 2020. Photo by me.

For a moment I thought I could track new data just as well as worldometers do. I could make my own charts and tables with my own insights and therefore fool myself that I could take control of the events. Some people and teams did theirs and their projects got world famous. Eventually I forgot about it. I had plenty on my plate and others did it well enough. In the end I didn’t feel like getting involved with data that grim any more than I already was.

Start of the year 2021 brought new developments and new threads to follow. Vaccination campaigns kicked off around the world yet initial optimism about vaccines was slowly fading. At least mine was. Complexity involved in the job to have the planet Earth vaccinated only gave me headache. With global trade and travel, no corner of the world is safe unless other corners are safe too. Today I know better that vaccination is just one of the weapons we will be using against the pandemic for quite a while to come.

In the meantime I made a vaccination tracker. It is a hopeful tracker which follows the global journey towards liberating 70% of population inoculated. I probably didn’t want to make the earlier one so as to only count illness and death into staggering numbers. It is way healthier to begin with end in mind and look forward to a goal.

Agata Brok, Developer at Geolytix

Title Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash