COVID source callout: Kentucky

While updating my vaccine data annotations yesterday, I noticed that Kentucky has made some changes to its COVID-19 data reporting. Kentucky’s state health department has switched from daily to weekly updates, following a common trend in state reporting over the past few weeks.

But this state also downgraded its vaccination data: it has, as far as I can tell, stopped publishing a report of vaccinations by race, ethnicity, and other demographic categories (previously posted once a week). And Kentucky’s new COVID-19 dashboard includes a “Weekly Surveillance Data” tab with, truly, some of the lowest-quality data visualizations I have seen throughout the entire course of the pandemic.

Kentucky, what is going on with this image quality?

Like, you can’t even read these numbers! Admittedly, the dashboard links out to a PDF report with better-quality visualizations, but it’s still a far cry from interactive or downloadable data. Two years into the pandemic, states are still struggling with reporting their numbers in an accessible manner.

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