Where are Covid-19 cases rising the most in Africa?

Because journalists have limited time and capacity to find, analyse and interpret data, the ADH Resurgence Dashboard makes it easy for journalists to explore the data per country. There are interesting stories in the data when you compare new COVID-19 cases (per million) to indicators such as people fully vaccinated, total deaths, positive rates or the stringency index. A full drop down menu of 20 indicators allows you to make these comparisons per country. Journalists are encouraged to use this dashboard to support their storytelling and also find interesting data stories.

Watch this video for a quick introduction to the main features of the Resurgence Map.

Updated daily, the resurgence map and leader board show where COVID-19 cases are rising the most in Africa. At the top of the leader board, countries with the highest increase in new cases are bright red, and at the bottom, countries with the greatest decrease in COVID-19 cases are bright blue. You can scrub the timeline and click play to see how the rate of new COVID-19 increases and decreases over time.

“The timeline allows us to visualise the progression of the pandemic in Africa. The option to see an individual country's case histories and the ability to overlay other datasets, helps us to understand the country-specific context." - Dirk Meerkotter, Developer of the ADH Resurgence Map.

What is unique about this dashboard?

The resurgence dashboard provides African country-specific data; this is valuable, as data and African narratives have been elsewhere neglected. By selecting a country on the map or from the drop down menu, you can see the number of new cases per million (as shown in the graph below). In this example of Kenya, the four waves in rising COVID-19 infections are very evident over time. In this case, we compared new cases per million to the positive rate. And because some indicators are less well known, the dashboard gives a full explanation for each indicator.

We include multiple options to view the data points (new, smoothed, total and per million). This enables journalists to explore varying views of the same dataset. The dropdown menu of 20 indicators includes a breadth of data options, in particular the stringency index and reproduction rate. 

“This is the only place I have seen data for the stringency index and reproduction rate. (And the explanation of the R value was particularly good!)” Matthew Kaufman, Solutions Journalism Network

What interesting questions can journalists ask about the resurgence of new cases?

The power of the Resurgence dashboard lies in the interactiveness of the data visualisation tool. It provides very detailed, user-friendly guidelines and definitions, and it flags where data is missing. Journalists might have questions about the relationship between the resurgence of new cases and total COVID-19 deaths. Users can select a particular African country, and overlay total deaths to compare. And when the graph you have created tells a particularly interesting story, you can download the visualisations as images in png format or download the datasets to explore further.

Begin exploring the dashboard now.

The Resurgence Dashboard is a social good.

Our data visualisations and copy are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and freely available for use and embedding in others’ work. Users are encouraged to explore the data, download the resources, leave feedback, and contact us for more information.

The data are sourced from Our World In Data (OWID) which provides their data as a public good. More specially the Resurgence Dashboard uses data from the COVID-19 dataset by OWID. The raw data is updated daily and available for download in CSV format.

Download the data

Our resurgence dashboard OWID datasets.

Preferred citation: African Data Hub. (2021). Resurgence Dashboard. [online] https://resurgence.africadatahub.org