World Health Organization — 2021

Explaining Covid‑19 Vaccination Benefits

A social media post simulates a chat between a person and WHO. It explains why vaccination is important to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, which leads to people (COVID‑19 patients, but also other patients) being left untreated. To explain that, the video uses an analogy of a cup (representing the capacity of a hospital), which is overflown with colored balls. Every ball represents a patient. Those who fell outside of the cup represent patients who were not able to get treatment due to overcrowded hospitals.

With illustrated analogies & a friendly conversational tone, these short videos try to explain why vaccination is important

Overview

In November of 2021, I began a 4‑month collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe) as a Data Visualization Consultant.

As part of the Risk Communication, Community Engagement and Infodemic Management team, my goal was to turn raw technical data into stories and develop data visualizations to illuminate new scientific evidence.

During my time there, I built internal tools, prototyped dozens of charts, and published 2 projects that I want to highlight in this case study:

Outcomes

The deliverables for both those projects were short animated videos for social media – but here you’ll also see some behind-the-scenes, like early sketches and prototypes.


Lives Saved

I created animated charts and diagrams to communicate findings from a study by WHO and ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) that estimated over 470,000 lives had been saved by COVID‑19 vaccination – in people over 60 years old – throughout the European Region.

The final infographic looks nothing like the early prototype below, built in Observable

Screen capture of Observable platform used to prototype charts. It displays 32 small unit charts for lives saved in European countries, sorted by percentage and absolute numbers

It was actually my first time using “Observable JavaScript” – and sharing its interactive notebooks with the team was great for testing, as members could play with different settings, colors, and filters.

We ended up ditching the small multiple approach with waffle charts, as it was too detailed.

The solution? A simple chart describing 2 scenarios: how many people would have died with and without vaccination.

Screenshots from video posted on social media.

This project has been viewed over 3 million times on social media and was even shared on Twitter by then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon.


Chat with WHO

I also created a series of 2 videos with animated graphics to explain the benefits of vaccination and protective measures against COVID‑19.

The idea was to simulate a conversation between a person and WHO, using analogies to convey the message. 💬

Sketch of hospital at full capacity (cup filled with circles, representing each patient)
Sketch of hospital over capacity (cup overflown with circles, representing patients being left untreated)
Hand-drawn sketches of the cup analogy, used to pitch the idea internally.

In the final version, the overflowing circles are not all red. Instead, they are of different colors, meaning not only COVID‑19 patients would be left untreated, but also any other patients who needed care.

Another video in this series was about additional protective measures, like wearing a mask. It illustrated how protecting yourself could prevent transmission – and protect countless others.

Sketch of network graphs representing how one person infects others, who will infect others, and so in…
Hand-drawn sketches of the infection spreading, also used to pitch the idea to the team.

The starting point for visualizing the spread of the disease was exactly that: a starting point.

Considering that dot on the center, represening 1 person with COVID‑19, transmits the disease to 2 other people, this is what a network diagram could look like, after 5 cycles:

Frames of the infection spreading (from 1 person to 2 more). Created on Flourish & edited on Figma.
Animated versions of the graphics. In the 2nd one, whole branches of infections are prevented. Created with ezgif.com.

As a side note, I created this network diagram connecting data points that I generated in Python.

Each dot has a unique Source value, and it gets connected to the dots under the Target column, like so:

Source Target
0 01
0 02
01 011
01 012
011 0111
011 0112
0111 01111
0111 01112
01111 011111
01111 011112
01112 011121
01112 011122
0112 01121
0112 01122
01121 011211
01121 011212
01122 011221
01122 011222
012 0121
012 0122
0121 01211
0121 01212
01211 012111
01211 012112
01212 012121
01212 012122
0122 01221
0122 01222
01221 012211
01221 012212
01222 012221
01222 012222
02 021
02 022
021 0211
021 0212
0211 02111
0211 02112
02111 021111
02111 021112
02112 021121
02112 021122
0212 02121
0212 02122
02121 021211
02121 021212
02122 021221
02122 021222
022 0221
022 0222
0221 02211
0221 02212
02211 022111
02211 022112
02212 022121
02212 022122
0222 02221
0222 02222
02221 022211
02221 022212
02222 022221
02222 022222
Scroll table rows to see very interesting numbers

You can see that the dot with source 0 (the one in the center of the diagram), is linked to 2 others (01 and 02).

Anyways, this is how the visual narrative turned out:

One cool thing is that these videos were generated from HTML elements.

I naturally used CSS to style them, and JavaScript to make them dynamic (including GSAP for timeline animation and matter.js for physics).

But, essentially, being HTML elements means it’s easy to change the content of the simulated messages – as well as to create versions in different languages.

So, in order to support country-specific teams, I created an automated tool for translating those videos into other languages, like Georgian. 🇬🇪

Screen capture of Google Sheets used to organized translated content for the videos. It displays columns for English, Russian, and Georgian languages

The (human) translator would add the contents of each message in a spreadsheet. The video would then be populated with the translated messages and all animations would be re-generated.

As a bonus, this tool made the whole text editing process (even in English!) very fast and easy – which is useful when editors make constant changes to the narrative.

These videos achieved around 10 million views across social media.

My Role