This project focused on one main question: what were the medical costs of the pandemic for European governments? I looked at how much countries spent on COVID care, how they paid for it, and what trade-offs they faced.

 

The data was clear for each country: we had total healthcare budgets, split by funding sources like taxes, insurance, and private payments, as well as by spending areas such as hospitals, outpatient care, and medicines. The challenge was that these categories did not match up perfectly between countries.

 

I wanted I wanted to compare countries while still showing that each healthcare system is unique. That led me to use the capsule metaphor. In the visuals, each country appears as a capsule: one side shows where the money comes from, and the other shows how it is spent. This design highlights both the structure and the fragility of each system, similar to how a medical capsule protects its contents but eventually breaks down. comparisons easier, I added an interactive filter allowing users to sort countries based on their top three healthcare funding sources. This provided a simple way to see, for example, which countries rely most heavily on government funding versus insurance systems.