In a sense, COVID-19 could be the perfect story to automate. As the virus spread across the world at the beginning of 2020, governments and health authorities made a considerable amount of open-source data available to the public, such as the number of deaths, patients in intensive care units and seven-day incidence rates.
This type of well-arranged data, which can fit into narratives that can be created in advance, lays the groundwork for a recent journalistic development known as “automated journalism," a computational process that creates automated pieces of news without any human intervention, except for the initial programming.
