Too many mornings over the last 11 months have started with me checking the Johns Hopkins University’s dashboard that began measuring the onslaught of the novel-coronavirus pandemic just over a year ago.

That page’s dismal totals remain stuck in my morning reading, but the past month has brought some relief: daily data about the advance of the vaccines that can strangle this virus.

The first one to land on my reading list was the vaccine-tracker page that Bloomberg set up in December. The news it’s delivered about vaccinations across the U.S. and around the world has gotten better every week–especially here in Virginia, no longer a laggard among the states. So has the design, as Bloomberg’s data-visualization wonks keep finding new ways to layer in more detail. They update this page (fortunately outside Bloomberg’s paywall) once or twice a day, most often starting at around 6 p.m., and I am now stuck in the habit of reloading it in idle moments.

About a week later, the Virginia Department of Health added a vaccination summary to its existing COVID-19 dashboard. That, too, has grown more info-dense, adding a doses-per-day chart that has steadily ascended over the last few weeks and, more recently, demographic data about distribution by age, race and gender. It also provides a map breaking down vaccination by cities and counties, plus a tab listing vaccine dose distributions across the commonwealth.

VDH has testing numbers posted by 10 a.m.–they have finally started nose-diving in the last couple of weeks–and now posts vaccination data no later than noon. This provides a nice bit of punctuation for the middle of the day.

The last week has put a third site on my reading list, the Centers for Disease Control’s vaccinations data tracker. The numbers here don’t tell me much that I won’t get at the other two sites. But since Jan. 20, seeing this page get updates every day, not just every few days and not on weekends, speaks to a welcome return of professionalism.

The time I spend reloading these pages and others–the Washington Post and the New York Times have also done good work here–won’t advance my own date with a needle. (I’m more focused on the timetable for my mom and my in-laws to get fully vaccinated, which fortunately now seems a matter of weeks instead of months.) But when every day can look like the one before, seeing these numbers climb proves otherwise. Each data point of progress cracks open the door out of this darkness a little wider.