By Adam Vaughan

Hannah Ritchie, head of research at Our World In Data, has been instrumental in providing the world with daily covid-19 data from the beginning of the pandemic. Here, she picks five charts that have stood out from the rest.

1. Lockdowns across Europe

“I think it all seems a bit fuzzy to us now, but around March 2020, we were in such uncharted territory. Countries were trying to figure out what they should do. The UK waited too long, despite most of mainland Europe already being in lockdown. I think this is a useful snapshot that shows the UK’s delay. Taking action earlier would likely have saved a lot of lives in the first wave.”

2. UK winter wave

“Each country has had its own pattern and timing of waves. Some had worse ones in [their] autumn. I think the clearest winter wave was in the UK, especially with the emergence of the ‘UK variant’, which created a lot of concern for other countries. For several weeks, we were recording more than 1000 deaths per day.”

3. Vaccine campaigns start

“This is possibly the most important metric we will track for years.”

4. India’s outbreak 

“India’s curve really starts ramping up in early March, but it was given very little attention until it was too late. The confirmed cases and death counts are likely to be very large underestimates of the actual scale of the outbreak.”

5. South America’s persistent battle

“Many countries have had quite distinct waves of covid, with large outbreaks then several months of low infection rates. However, several countries across South America have had almost a year of relatively high levels of infection and deaths. They haven’t really been able to get it under control. Much of the attention is on India now, but South America, in many ways, has been worst hit. We also think excess deaths there are much higher than confirmed deaths.”