Timeline: WHO's COVID-19 response

The World Health Organization wanted to create a timeline of events highlighting how quickly science moved to meet this global health threat and WHO’s role in coordinating the response.

We plotted major milestones against daily case numbers in each WHO region, building a day-by-day record of a long two years.

To declutter the timeline we included an option to filter events by their categories and we used stars to distinguish the most significant events. Considerations for accessibility like colour blindness were also built into the design from the start.

Our work had to move fast to keep up with the pandemic. Just four months after we started, the completed timeline was launched. The team at WHO loved it, it was the highlight of the WHO.int homepage and they even pinned it to the top of the @WHO Twitter page.