COVID-19 Testing Data
Aug. 17, 2020 – Feb. 26, 2022
As The Huntington News, the independent student paper at Northeastern University, began to plan for its return to campus and coverage of the university’s response to the pandemic, one key step was to produce and manage a COVID-19 testing dashboard using the data released by Northeastern.
I volunteered to create and maintain the dashboard, updating daily as the university published new figures regarding the number of tests administered and the number of positive cases on its own dashboard.
A key goal, as I managed the dashboard, was to ensure that the data was published in the most accurate and balanced way possible, even as others in the campus community worried that the official university dashboard displayed the statistics in a misleading way.
As the point-person for Huntington News dashboard, a role I tackled in addition to serving as managing editor and projects editor, I also became the staff expert on the COVID-19 testing numbers on campus and unofficially took on the responsibility of reporting on major trends or changes in the numbers.
The dashboard was created and run through Tableau to allow readers to interact with the data to better understand the trends as well as view data for more limited time ranges.
