Reflecting on 6 months of COVID-19 coverage

Reflecting on 6 months of COVID-19 coverage

Believe it or not, the first COVID-19 case arrived in Massachusetts six months ago.

It was diagnosed ten days BEFORE the World Health Organization assigned the official name. When my teammates and I published coverage about the first infection, we were all still calling it the “novel coronavirus.”

Those days seem like a long time ago.

At first people resisted the change from “coronavirus” to “COVID-19.” It took months for that new acronym to enter our everyday usage.

My team’s latest special report, published this morning, reflects on all that has changed since the pandemic arrived in Massachusetts and looks at many of the important changes on the horizon, such as local work on a vaccine to the issues with reopening schools.

Our report also features infographic elements. The first uses Storyline from KnightLab to display the dates of key events along the chart of cases diagnosed in the state. The second is an Infogram which highlights several key facts about the current state of affairs. Finally, we have a nationwide map tracking the scale of the outbreak in each state.