What a COVID-19 Dashboard Can Do?

As of 3.12, the new coronavirus has infected over 80,000 people in China. Fortunately, China has controlled the epidemic according to strict policies, and the number of new cases outside Hubei has approached zero.

But in addition, due to the population movement caused by tourism, the epidemic situation in Japan and South Korea is getting worse. As of 3.12, Korea has confirmed 7,513 cases, died 54. The situation in Europe and the United States is more serious.

I believe that everyone must be very concerned about the changes in the epidemic situation, but in the face of huge amounts of Internet data, we often cannot find the data we are most concerned about. Moreover, when we get the data, we can’t handle the comparison well, and can’t dig out the value of the data.

How to solve this problem? Data visualization is a good way. I believe that everyone must be familiar with the COVID-19 data dashboard launched by various information platforms. A dashboard can contain data in multiple dimensions and display data in maps, charts, etc., allowing you to understand the changes in data more clearly.

Have you ever thought that you can easily make a dashboard like this? If you are interested, this article will teach you how to make it step by step from data extraction, data cleaning to data visualization.

Here we use Octoparse to scrawl the data, FineReport to make the dashboard.

Made by FineReport

Data Extraction

The tool we use is Octoparse, which is a very simple data crawling tool, and there are many templates that can be used directly. It is easy to obtain data without writing complex code, and the operation is very simple. It can be done by dragging and clicking. You can see the detailed guide here.

We only need 3 steps：

Step 1: Build a scraper task by entering the URL

Step 2: Click to extract the web data

Step 3: Execute the scraper task

First, we select “Advanced mode”, paste the target link into Octoparse, save the URL, then the website can be opened in the built-in browser.

Second, click one of the tables, and Octoparse will identify the corresponding content. Since a single table column is identified, and we need to identify all the contents of the table, we need to go to the “Action Tips” side and click “Expand Selection Area”. In this way, all the required content in this column will be selected.

Then click “Select all sub-elements”-“Select all” to identify the entire form.

Last but not least, click “start extraction”.

Click the toggle button to view the extraction process. As we complete fetching the data, we can export to an excel format and use it to create a map visualization.

Data Cleaning

Since the data fields we collected have not been modified, and some data will affect the visualization, we need to perform some simple data cleaning. This step is critical for visualization and cannot be easily ignored.

We changed the “field1, filed2, field3” to the corresponding confirmed, death, in quarantine, and delete some useless data.

Data cleaning is a very critical step in the entire process. Since the amount of data this time is small, it does not take much time, but if it encounters a very large amount of data, it will take a long time. About more data cleaning ways, you can refer to this:

https://www.finereport.com/en/data-analysis/data-cleaning-guide-saving-80-of-your-time-to-do-data-analysis.html

Data Visualization in Dashboard

Here we use FineReport to make a Korea COVID-19 dashboard. It may take you just ten minutes, is it amazing?

I will show you how to make this dashboard step by step, you can download here to practice with me!

Data Connection

First, we need to connect the data we just collected. FineReport supports many kinds of databases.

Click the “plus” button and choose “file”, select the Excel file we just collected, remember to have a preview to check the accuracy of the data, then click “ok”, the data have been imported!

Design and Make Charts your Dashboard Needs

Next is to design this dashboard, we need to make a map chart, a bubble chart, a line chart, and some news notifications. With FineReport, you can easily make 19 categories charts by drag and drop. We here use the map chart as an example.

First, click the “insert” button on the menu, and choose “insert chart”, and insert a map chart. There are many countries map built in FineReport, you can choose what you need.

Next, we need to associate the excel data to each place on the map and set the fields to be displayed.

Finally, we can modify the color to make it more compatible with the entire dashboard.

Follow this process, we can make the other charts and finally we get this dashboard!!

The data can be updated by front-end importing or API. Shown here is the 3.12 updated Korea data. The carousel chart can show the confirmed and death data of each city. The line chart can update the historical data to the current data in real-time. The bubble chart can show which city is affected most. From the hyperlink, we can see some latest news about COVID-19.

Conclusion

Although the coronavirus has spread to many countries all over the world, as long as strict prevention and control measures are adopted, people are sure to overcome this disaster. The weather will soon be warming, and the coronavirus will gradually weaken in hot conditions. We hope that we can control the epidemic by June.

Follow FineReport Reporting Software to know more about the data visualization guides.

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