Dagstuhl-Seminar — Reflections on Pandemic Visualization

The global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic has presented massive challenges and real opportunities for data science and visualization research and technology. Epidemiologists, virologists, infection control experts and public health officials are required to make sense of information from a huge variety of data sources. Physicians and medical researchers have access to rapidly changing medical data as the pandemic evolves. Political stakeholders (supported by economists, public health officials, and other experts analyzing the data) make decisions on which action to take, balancing the impact on public health with social and economic impacts. The general public is regularly presented with visualization, through news, conventional and social media, and government publications, and these inform their actions for the next days and weeks.