As the COVID-19 pandemic spins out of control in the United States, you once again need to keep your eye on it. (Exhausting, we know.)
Over here at Fast Company, we have used dozens of trackers since February. The reigning favorite (for this reporter, at least) is the COVID-19 Tracker from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which displays everything you need to know at a glance: country cases (new, active, recovered, fatal), outbreak maps, and for each country, a graph showing daily new cases, plus a half dozen charts that allow quick regional comparisons, and the all-important Curve of Cases Over Time. (The U.S. curve is currently not a curve, but an upward-slanted line, which might as well say we are screwed.)
Bing’s tool originally lacked county-by-county data; the addition of granular data has made it a standout. Click on any state, and you immediately see county-by-county outbreaks and comparisons. Relevant news articles pop up, too, in case you want to further dive into the clusterjam.
While lots of trackers display similar information, Bing’s dashboard is distinguished by an intuitive, lightweight design: It just works. Meaning that you, a layperson, you can thoroughly understand the situation in 30 seconds. Bing, please give your tracker team a bonus.
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