COVID source shout-out: Oklahoma
As of yesterday, 42 states and D.C. are reporting vaccinations by race and ethnicity. One of those states is Oklahoma.
Read MoreMonth: February 2021
Featured sources and federal data updates, Feb. 28
Featured sources and federal updates for the week of Feb. 28 include vaccines, the CDC’s methodology, school opening, and more.
Read MoreDiving into COVID-19 data #2: Workshop recap
Our second workshop happened this week! Liz Essley Whyte, an investigative reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, discussed her work bringing White House COVID-19 reports to the public before they were officially released. Erica Hensley, an independent health and data journalist based in Jackson, Mississippi, provided advice for navigating relationships with local public health officials based on her work reporting on COVID-19 in Mississippi. And Tom Meagher, a senior editor at The Marshall Project, described the communication and coordination work behind his newsroom’s yearlong tracker of COVID-19 in the U.S. prison system. Thank you to everyone who attended!
Read MoreJ&J vaccine authorized, VRBPAC has fantastic hold music
Yesterday, the FDA gave the Janssen—did you know it’s pronounced yahn-sen? I didn’t—vaccine Emergency Use Authorization, allowing it to join the likes of Pfizer and Moderna in the exclusive club of vaccines that may now be distributed in the U.S. Welcome, Janssen. (As a total coincidence I’m wearing my shirt that just says “Vaccines!” on it as I write this.) But the addition of a new vaccine in circulation also brings data reporting questions with few easy answers.
Read MoreWhat makes a successful semester during COVID-19?
In the COVID-19 Data Dispatch this week, I wanted to share some bonus material from my recent Science News story. One of my favorite interviews that I did for this feature was with Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and MIT. The Broad Institute helped over 100 colleges and universities set up COVID-19 testing and student symptom monitoring, most of them in New England. When I talked to Dr. Sabeti, though, she mostly spoke about Colorado Mesa University—a small school in Grand Junction, Colorado that saw it as a moral imperative to bring all of their students back to campus this fall.
Read MoreNational numbers, Feb. 28
After several weeks of declines, cases now appear to be in a plateau. But the COVID Tracking Project cautions that these numbers may also be the aftershocks of President’s Day and the winter storm, which led to artificially low numbers last week and delayed reporting arriving this week. One thing is for certain, though: vaccinations are recovering from the storm. We had two record vaccination days Friday and yesterday.
Read MoreCOVID source callout: Iowa
Iowa has taken down a page on its dashboard that used to report test positivity by school district. The page now goes to a 404 error, and there’s no mention of school data elsewhere on the state’s COVID-19 website.
Read MoreFeatured sources, Feb. 21
Featured sources for the week of Feb. 21 include vaccines, variants, and more vaccines.
Read MoreNext in vaccination data demands: some, oh god, just any occupational data
Not a single state reports out vaccination by occupation.
Read MoreDiving into COVID-19 data #1: Workshop recap
Our first workshop happened this week! Drew Armstrong, Bloomberg News’s senior editor for health care, talked about his work on the publication’s Vaccine Tracker; and Arielle Levin Becker, director of communications and strategic initiatives for the Connecticut Health Foundation, discussed how to navigate COVID-19 race and ethnicity data. Thank you to everyone who attended—we had a great turnout!
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