The CDC uses the color blue like it’s going out of style, with heatmap-style charts that range from teal to a dark, indigo shade for states that have administered the most vaccine doses relative to their populations.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of April 25 include COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons and a new risk assessment tool.
Read MoreThe Incubator for Media Education and Development, or iMedD, is a nonprofit based in Athens, Greece that supports new practices, credibility, and transparency in international journalism. Kelly Kiki, a journalist and project manager at iMedD’s content production arm, wrote a profile of my work at the COVID-19 Data Dispatch.
Read MoreAfter 10 days, the pause on the J&J vaccine has been lifted. According to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, there have been about 1.9 cases of severe blood clotting per million people who had received the J&J vaccine. It has been re-authorized for use in people aged 18 and older, now with an addendum to the label and fact sheet warning of the risk of blood clots.
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You can now get vaccination numbers for U.S. states, counties, and metropolitan areas in an easily downloadable format: the Community Profile Reports published daily by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). These reports are basically the HHS’s one-stop shop for COVID-19 data, including information on cases, deaths, PCR tests, hospitalizations—and now, vaccines.
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This week, I had a story on COVID-19 testing published in Slate’s Future Tense vertical. The piece explores how testing will change in the next few months as more Americans become vaccinated and rapid tests become more widely available. In the CDD today, I’m excited to share one of the interviews I conducted for the piece, with Dan Larremore, a statistician at the University of Colorado and long-time advocate for the potential of rapid tests.
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After several weeks of rising cases, the federal numbers dropped this week by about 10%. Michigan’s case rates fell below 500 new cases per 100,000 people and its positivity rate is trending downward, leading public health experts to hope that this state’s worrying outbreak may have peaked. As always, though, we can’t get too excited about a single-week trend—and 60,000 new cases each day is still a concerning level at which to plateau.
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Last spring, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set up a special website compiling guidance on how to treat COVID-19 patients, intended as a resource for physicians and researchers. We featured this source in an issue a couple of months ago, but I wanted to revisit it today because the site’s one-year anniversary is coming up this week!
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of April 18 include CDC reports on COVID-19 hospitalization and Google search trends.
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A lot of journalists, especially those who aren’t familiar with the science/health beat, may be inclined to publish news of breakthrough cases as surprising or monumental. In fact, these cases—referring to a COVID-19 infection that occurs after someone has been fully vaccinated—are entirely normal, yet incredibly rare. But we still need to pursue data on them.
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