Most effective way of highlighting key information in a tabular format for public emergencies

With lots of government information being published and used during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lot of opportunity to apply effective design when it comes to infographics and data visualization. Here is an example of the Queensland Government in Australia providing a table to compare the symptoms between COVID-19, Common Cold and the Flu

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Personally I find the use of long tables difficult for making comparisons, but much more suited to the display of data, but in this case there may be some good reason for doing so:

  1. There are three well defined conditions that people are presenting with so there are not too many comparisons across the page
  2. The information is critically important and very easy to get confused so diagrams might be less useful for self-diagnosis purposes
  3. It is easy to update or change information presented in this format

I think there are possible improvements that can be made, and I am wondering if there are examples of this type of information being published around the world that are good examples. I think improvements could include:

  • Grouping symptoms so that we can quickly see those shared by all three and those that are unique to each of the conditions
  • Ordering the symptoms in order of most common to least common
  • Provide description of symptoms rather than the use of icons, which doesn't really add much more to the information
  • Use of colours to provide better contrast and for accessibility
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