[YZF]

To add to this the scale of the data is presumably quite small as well. The geographical resolution is probably not super fine, there's only a handful of different kinds of data (deaths, vaccination whatnot) and the time resolution doesn't have to be too fine either (a day?). Even if you wanted to query it in very sophisticated ways you wouldn't need a database.

[londons_explore]

In fact, the UK dashboard had a suspicious outage when total case numbers exceeded the 1 million row limit of Excel... I suspect excel is used in the data prep stage, if not used in serving the dashboard.