COVID source callout: Iowa
Iowa’s frequent dashboard updates are very impressive. But a little transparency about precisely when those updates occur would go a long way.
Read MoreMonth: October 2020
Featured sources, Oct. 25
Featured sources for Oct. 25 include school attendance, ICE detentions, and COVID-19 at the White House.
Read MoreHHS changes may drive hospitalization reporting challenges
This past week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) opened up a new area of data reporting for hospitals around the country. In addition to their numbers of COVID-19 patients and supply needs, hospitals are now asked to report their numbers of influenza patients, including flu patients in the ICU and those diagnosed with both flu and COVID-19.
Read MoreIt is, once again, time to talk about antigen testing
Antigen tests have become a major part of the national testing strategy. Six tests have received Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA. After Abbott’s antigen test was given this okay-to-distribute in late August, the White House quickly purchased 150 million tests and made plans to distribute them across the country. Context: the U.S. has done about 131 million total tests since the pandemic began, according to the COVID Tracking Project’s most recent count. Clearly, antigen testing is here—and beginning to scale up. But most states are ill-prepared to report the antigen tests going on in their jurisdictions, and federal public health agencies are barely reporting them at all.
Read MoreWhat I learned from my Science Writers session
The Science Writers 2020 session I organized was called “Diving into the data: How data reporting can shape science stories.” Its goal was to introduce science writers to the world of data and to show them that this world is not a far-off inaccessible realm, but is rather a set of tools that they can add to their existing reporting skills.
Read MoreFeatured sources, Oct. 18
Featured sources for Oct. 18 include journalists in the pandemic and FDA EUAs.
Read MoreHow did the Bachelorette test contestants?
This week, for the first time since I was peer-pressured into watching the Bachelor franchise two-ish years ago, I listened to a recap podcast. To be clear, this was not your typical Bachelor franchise recap podcast. The hosts did not judge contestants on their attractiveness, nor did they speculate about the significance of the First Impression Rose. Instead, it was POLITICO’s Dan Diamond and Jeremy Siegel, discussing COVID-19 safety precautions and public health messaging as seen on The Bachelorette.
Read MoreNew, shareable graphics from the COVID Racial Data Tracker
This week, the COVID Tracking Project’s web design team launched a new feature that makes our demographic data more accessible to readers. It’s called Infection and Mortality by Race and Ethnicity: simply click on a state or territory, and the feature will return a chart that compares COVID-19 cases and deaths to that region’s population.
Read MoreCDC’s failure to resist political takeover
This past week, two outlets published major investigations of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). The first story, by Science’s Charles Piller, focuses on White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and her role in the hospitalization data switch from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The second story, by ProPublica’s James Bandler, Patricia Callahan, Sebastian Rotella, and Kristen Berg, provides a broader view of internal CDC dynamics and challenges since the start of the pandemic.
Read MoreContact tracing: Too little, too late, no public data
Contact tracing, or the practice of limiting disease spread by personally informing people that they have been exposed, has been a major method for controlling COVID-19 spread in other countries, such as South Korea. But in the U.S. the strategy is—like every other part of our nation’s COVID-19 response—incredibly patchwork. We have no national contact tracing app, much less a national contact tracing workforce, leaving states to set up these systems on their own.
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