Covid-19 is the culmination of two years of data.

What has been a daily Covid marker for over two years has ended.

Am I depressed? Certainly not. It is, however, a watershed point in Northern Ireland’s Covid-19 saga.

The Covid-19 daily dashboard statistics were published online by the Department of Health for more than two years.

That stopped on Friday, when the final post stated that “262 positive cases have been detected in the last 24 hours, with no deaths confirmed during that time.”

However, while data publication has halted, Covid has not.

Over the last two years, my colleagues and I at the Northern Ireland health center have moved daily data to massive whiteboards that have dominated our time.

By May 2022, we had depleted four big boards, each having numbers on both the back and front.

Every number represented a person, a man or a woman, each with their own narrative.

Families initially told us that they did not want their loved ones to be remembered as a statistic.

Catherine Smyth, my coworker, and I took turns filling in the board; at first, the writing was tidy and orderly, but our patience wore thin.

“This will probably last around three months,” one of us said.

We often knew the person behind the number in the early days, but then the numbers increased and we couldn’t keep up.

It became impossible to put days into weeks and months.