IDSC Visualization, Data Communication, and Information Design Director Alberto Cairo was one of six Visualization Experts featured in this Fast Company piece on the “graphics that do the best job of telling an important story about coronavirus.”

Dr. Cairo is quoted: “As I wrote in my tweet, good journalism doesn’t consist of just showing data as charts or maps; good journalism is about explaining how to read those charts, and emphasizing what they mean. In other words, the purpose of visualization isn’t just visualization per se, but helping people make sense of data.” Referring to this explanation by Brian Stelter of CNN, who illustrates, not only the effectiveness of a simple bar graph in illuminating the benefit of preventive measures, but also, when the dotted line is drawn to indicate the healthcare system capacity, it becomes clear how crucial those measures are to the care one might receive.

Other principles explained in the article include: how we can help not spread the virus by staying home if we may have it but are asymptomatic; how the math on transmission growth illustrates the need for social distancing; how a simple table can be the best way to illustrate cases by country, which helps in understanding how their response measures played a factor; and a graph that illustrates the trajectory of how the virus spread by location, indicating where your country might be headed.

Read the full text here.