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 for the week of Feb. 21 include vaccines, variants, and more vaccines.
Read More
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!
Read More
I wrote a tipsheet on covering COVID-19 vaccines for The Open Notebook. The piece provides tools and resources specifically for writers on the vaccine beat—both those who have been covering the pandemic for months and those who are now incorporating vaccine news into other aspects of their reporting. But this advice also applies more broadly to anyone simply talking about vaccines.
Read More
The number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals is now the lowest it’s been since early November. About 7,000 new patients were admitted each day this week—while this is still a huge number, it’s a notable drop from the peak (18,000 per day) we saw earlier in the winter.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of Feb. 14 include a webinar on federal data, vaccinations, and anti-Asian hate incidents.
Read More
The CDC continues to improve its vaccination reporting. The agency is now regularly reporting demographic data on its dashboard—including race, ethnicity, age, and sex. But when it comes to tracking who’s getting vaccinated in America, we still have a long way to go.
Read More
Under Biden, national public health leadership could require that all public schools report their case counts, testing numbers, and enrollment numbers to the federal government—and publish these figures in a systematic way. But the new CDC guidance largely retains the status quo for school COVID-19 data.
Read More
The 7-day average for new cases was under 100,000 this week for the first time since October—but it’s still far above the records that America set during our spring and summer surges. n White House briefings this week, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said that it will take a unified effort for us to continue this trend, especially as coronavirus variants pose an increased threat.
Read MoreThis past Monday, the COVID Tracking Project announced that it will soon close its operations. The Project will release its final update on March 7; then, after two more months of documentation, analysis, and archival work, it will close out in May.
Read More