On Friday, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins posted a video of a “COVIDized” “Here Comes The Sun” to his NIH Director’s blog, in which he thanked “NIH-ers” and promised a way out of the “long, dark, COVID winter.”
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This week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced two major expansions for vaccine eligibility. State residents age 30 and older became eligible starting on March 30, and residents age 16 and older became eligible starting on April 6. This expansion allowed two of my favorite vaccine communicators to get their shots!
Read MoreFor the past year, nonprofit news organization The Marshall Project has tracked COVID-19 cases in prisons, in collaboration with The Associated Press. The tracking effort has primarily focused on compiling numbers from state and federal prison bureaus, through a weekly tally that compares total cases reported by these agencies to their previous totals. This week, though, the Federal Bureau of Prisons started excluding a lot of prisoners from their count, making it impossible for the Marshall Project to compile accurate numbers.
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Hawaii is the latest state to add vaccinations by race to its dashboard. I am a fan of both the state’s green-and-orange color choices and its handy finger-pointing icon, instructing users to hover over each bar in order to compare vaccination numbers to Hawaii’s demographics.
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In the White House COVID-19 briefing this past Monday, equity task force director Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith showed, for one fleeting minute, a slide on completeness of state-by-state data on vaccinations by race and ethnicity. The slide pointed out that racial/ethnic data was only available for 53% of vaccinations, and most states report these data for fewer than 80% of records.
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One of the newest states to start reporting race/ethnicity vaccination data is Minnesota. At a glance, the Race/Ethnicity tab of the state’s vaccine data dashboard looks comprehensive: it includes demographic data stratified by age, as well as a bar chart that compares the population that’s been vaccinated to Minnesota’s population overall. But closer examination shows one crucial issue.
Read MoreAs of yesterday, 42 states and D.C. are reporting vaccinations by race and ethnicity. One of those states is Oklahoma.
Read MoreIowa 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 MoreUsually when we do a COVID source callout, we’re putting our sights on a dashboard that’s actually five separate dashboards or a state that likes to surprise us when they update their dataset. This is to say that, usually, we don’t call out an actual source of coronavirus. But that’s what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo apparently wants to be when he grows up, as he opened up limited indoor dining on February 12th for New York City.
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.
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