Our favorite COVID-19 sources

Last week, I asked readers to share their go-to sources for COVID-19 data about their community. Thank you to everyone who responded! I am always on the lookout for great sources myself, so I appreciated seeing what folks are using.

Here are a couple of responses that I wanted to highlight:

  • The New York Times cases map: Two readers noted that they liked the NYT dashboard, which makes it easy to compare COVID-19 metrics in different parts of the country. The NYT offers data at the county level and provides annotations and context with much more detail than most government sources.
  • City and county sites: Seven readers said that they regularly check their county or city dashboards for local information. One reader complimented the City of Chicago dashboard as “consistently updated with official data, easy to use.”
  • Social media: Readers referred to Twitter links to articles shared by both national and local journalists. One reader praised daily COVID-19 update posts shared on a local Boston subreddit: “The posts take publicly available Massachusetts health data and synthesize them in a way I’ve gotten very used to. This is the source I depend on when I tell people that COVID hasn’t been getting better in Massachusetts since June.”
  • The Glastonbury Town Manager weekly email: My mom’s favorite source is the email newsletter sent by the local administration in my hometown, Glastonbury, Connecticut. This email—which I’ve highlighted in the newsletter before—includes data for the town, updates for the state, and public service announcements.
  • New York Governor Cuomo’s daily updates: You have to hand it to him: no other local leader is using PowerPoint quite like Cuomo. Also, nobody else built a literal model of his state’s COVID-19 case curve.

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