July 29, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.
My last big story for this week is to heavily recommend this ProPublica feature by Caroline Chen and Ash Ngu on how to navigate COVID-19 data. Chen is a veteran health journalist who has been reporting on COVID-19 since January (and who reported on previous disease outbreaks before that). Her story explains how to understand test positivity rates, data lags, and the inherent uncertainty that comes with any attempt to quantify this pandemic.
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July 26, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
West Virginia insists on reporting COVID-19 cases assigned to racial categories which do not exist.
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July 26, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.
Featured sources for July 26 include the COVID Racial Data Tracker and excess deaths.
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July 26, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
The U.S. urgently needs better standards for COVID-19 data at national, state, and local levels, argues Resolve to Save Lives, a nongovernmental initiative run by the global health organization Vital Strategies. Resolve is led by President and CEO Dr. Tom Frieden, a former Director of the CDC; he worked with other public health experts on a report which reviewed the availability of COVID-19 data in the U.S.
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July 26, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.
On July 14, the White House announced that hospitals across America would no longer report their COVID-19 patient numbers and supply needs to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Instead, they would report numbers through a data portal set up in April by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). A July 10 guidance issued by HHS requests that hospitals send reports on how many overall patients they have, how many COVID-19 patients they have, the status of those patients, and their needs for crucial supplies such as PPE and remdesivir.
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