On the Impossibility of Visualizing a Pandemic

Every graphic tells a story, and we desperately need stories in order to divine meaning out of chaos

This week marks a year that the Covid Tracker Project, based out of The Atlantic, has been gathering data on the pandemic. With that anniversary, the editors recently announced they’re ending the data collection part of their work. For the past year, I’ve become accustomed to starting and ending most days with graphs like these: Line graphs laying out the number of Covid cases, the number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths; heat maps showing the severity of outbreaks, organized by county and by zip code. And now, the ever-expanding number of vaccines delivered.

Each of these charts tells a narrative, particularly during the first wave last April, when my need to scan the data for signs that the disease was slowing became almost ritualistic, like scrutinizing a Tarot card or the entrails of a goat, divining meaning out of what seemed like utter chaos. It’s not entirely coincidental that these graphs, at…