Visual analytics dashboards illustrate analytic processes, compiling huge amounts of data to visualize trends and occurrences, aiming to present both specialists and the general public with critical information using a quick and efficient modality. The resulting views, that could comprise graphs, time lines, different kinds of charts and diagrams or maps, can be shared with many users and stakeholders, and are meant to help to better communicate statistics, actionable results and disseminate information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw an emergence and rapid development of analytical dashboards for epidemiological and public health monitoring purposes. They were initiated by public health institutes, academia, media outlets, international organisations and/or citizen initiatives, and were generally open to all interested parties, both inside and outside the public health field. Public, web-based COVID-19 dashboards allow for communication on a large scale, to and between data providers and public health organizations, and to citizens, journalists and special interest groups, such as patient organisations and have therefore been widely adopted during the pandemic. The plethora of such dashboards (around 200 in April 2021) have showcased the limitations and difficulties inherent in the format, which may be related to the differing rationales, the heterogeneous definitions and widely varying choice of indicators that are included, along with shifting practices over the waves of the pandemic, from diagnosis to testing to vaccination rates. This has highlighted the need for collaboration between public health authorities, the field of medical informatics and academic groups when developing epidemic dashboard tools opened to a large public. This workshop will address the theoretical aspects behind the use of visual analytical dashboards. We will show examples of dashboards, with the goal of understanding and comparing the main reasons driving their development, maintenance and improvements. We will show how the choices of indicators, the access to data, the technology used as well as how time pressure and expectations, including from policy makers, were handled. Finally, we will make recommendations on how existing dashboards, both pre- and post COVID-19, can be adapted to handle the data needs of the next international incident or pandemic, and also look at the broader picture, namely he policies underlying the whole picture.Key messages Dashboards are a useful tool, used extensively to support decision-making during the COVID-19 crisis.These dashboards must be fine-tuned to make policy response possible.