@AlbertoCairo
Old-school qualitative-oriented people believe that whatever it is you want to understand, you need to view the problem in its context. But you will hear "context is critical" mantra also from great data practitioners like Giorgia Lupi or Alberto Cairo.
But as Alberto Cairo points out, Francis is maybe asking too much of the medium? I don't think dataviz role in the pandemic is to show the horrors of dying alone in a hospital (hopefully writers will do that for us). But dataviz is best suited to break the problem of abstracting modern society and show us the scale of the problem, even if we cannot see it with our eyes (because Covid is not like leprosy).