Goodbye to daily Covid-19 updates and goodbye to The Spinoff Covid tracker.
The Spinoff’s Covid trackers were built with the generous support of Spinoff Members.
Today there will be no Covid-19 update. No daily case numbers, no hospitalisation rates, no seven-day rolling average. For more than 900 days, New Zealanders have checked their site of choice (including thespinoff.co.nz) to find out the latest numbers in our ongoing fight with Covid-19. But not today. Today there will be no Covid-19 update from Jacinda Ardern or the director-general of health or the Ministry of Health website. There won’t be one today and there won’t be one tomorrow and there won’t be one on Friday.
Next Monday there will be an update, and thus will begin the new weekly update cycle.
The Spinoff will continue to update Covid numbers as they are made available (weekly) and will visualise them as needed, but given the need for the Covid tracker data to be broken down by day, not week, the tracker will no longer be accurate or able to update as it has for the past year.
So it’s goodbye to daily updates and therefore goodbye to The Spinoff Covid tracker.
The very first iteration of The Spinoff’s Covid tracker was published on March 31, 2020 under the headline: Covid-19: Every New Zealand case, mapped and charted. The article, by datavis extraordinaire Chris McDowall, included stunning graphs that provided the framework for our Covid-19 data visualisation. Back then, during a nationwide level four lockdown, the numbers were low and the interest was high. This is what the first Spinoff daily reported cases graph looked like.
Every day at 1pm, McDowall would listen to the latest numbers, add them do his data set, update the maps and graphs, and publish a new and beautiful article. This continued daily and on May 4, the much-anticipated zero day arrived, with Toby Morris at the ready.
By May 8, the curve had been flattened and McDowall’s graphs moved from their own standalone pieces to a daily set in live updates. Being able to see Morris and Siouxsie Wiles’ original and hypothetical “flatten the curve” graphic be rendered very real in our daily cases graph was a constant reassurance to readers. There was still much anticipation around 1pm and new numbers, but for days, weeks, even months, it was met with relief and an idyllic visual.
The graphs continued to be updated, even when there were very few numbers to report. There were blissfully quiet times (summer 2020/21) and times when McDowall returned to daily posts (August 2020 Auckland lockdown). When there were cases to report, thousands of readers refreshed both The Spinoff live updates and the homepage, desperate to know what was happening. And in August 2021, with the country’s second nationwide level four lockdown announced, the need for accessible and accurate data only grew.
So, the Spinoff’s head of data at the time, Harkanwal Singh, created, through sheer determination and likely little sleep, the Covid tracker 2.0. These graphs took the same information and auto-updated it, meaning one location for the latest numbers, no matter the time or day. Launched on August 24, the new tracker would go on to paint a much scarier picture than its predecessor’s gentle curve. Instead it would draw a mountain, peaking at 23,894 cases in one day (March 8, 2022).
During the long lockdown, the Covid tracker had thousands of visitors a day. But much like the loosening of measures and the social cohesion fatigue, interest in the graphs waned as people “returned to normal”. The 1pm updates no longer stopped people in their tracks.
When the government announced earlier this year that Covid numbers would only be released on weekdays, the tracker moved to more manual input to fill in the days. It could stay updated, but not on a daily basis. Such a tracker was designed to be updated every day, plotting data points in that rhythm.
Now, with daily case numbers trending downwards (though still more than 1,000 most days) the latest Covid numbers will be announced only every Monday. We’ll continue to include these numbers in our live updates, but will no longer be able to update the Covid tracker accurately without a daily breakdown from MoH. Here is how it currently looks, updated to yesterday, September 13, 2022.
And that is how it will stay unless catastrophe strikes – let’s not even think about that. As sad as it is to farewell The Spinoff Covid tracker (and whatever your thoughts on the evolving response), I think I speak for many when I say I hope we are never forced to resurrect it again.
Farewell, Covid tracker, thank you for your service.