The year 2020 saw the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that not only had wide-reaching social and economic consequences but also put healthcare systems under stress. Strategies for coping with the virus depended heavily on the interpretation of data. This article uses information from a UK upper tier local authority to examine how closely the rise in COVID-19 cases could be predicted from graphs. Plotting the data and analysing the graphs are useful exercises for post-16 science students.