By Heather Estop, Communications Executive, SAGE Publishing

This post originally appeared on the SAGE Ocean Blog.

With COVID-19 at the forefront of our global consciousness, research communities across the globe are putting their full force into collecting, analyzing and sharing data to help us better understand the pandemic. These free data mapping and visualization platforms provide insights into the numbers in a format that’s digestible both for the research community and the general public.

• An interactive data dashboard from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University tracks global COVID-19 cases, deaths and recoveries in real time. All the data is stored on GitHub.

• Bing's COVID-19 tracker combines total global case numbers with the latest news stories from affected countries.

• This collection of visuals from Flowing Data helps make sense of coronavirus data: Who is affected, how did it spread, and what can we do.

• Data visualization designer Amanda Makulec shares advice to think carefully about how to communicate pandemic data: Visualizations are powerful tools, but in the worst cases can lead to misinformation or incite panic.

• Tableau has launched a free resource page featuring data visualizations about the spread of COVID-19 and the public health response.

• Our World In Data has aggregated research on COVID-19 helping to make the data understandable and accessible for readers. Graphics illustrate confirmed cases, testing, and containment strategies.

• Genomic analysis of the spread of coronavirus: An interactive visualization from Nextstrain.

• This epidemic calculator contextualizes COVID-19 numbers and forecasts described in the media, and can help predict the impact of intervention.