Anyone who’s pulled up the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) dashboard in the last week or two has likely noticed this trend: hundreds of sewershed sites are currently marked as “no recent data.”
For my recent wastewater data story, I’ve been looking at a lot of wastewater surveillance dashboards from different health agencies and research groups. One of my favorites is from Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network (SCAN), a project based out of Stanford University.
After the CDC released its National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) dashboard in February, the agency faced some criticism. The CDC has responded with some helpful upgrades to its dashboard, though there’s still room for improvement.
Florida recently switched from weekly COVID-19 reports to reports every other week—making it even more difficult for reporters, researchers, and others in the state to follow their local COVID-19 trends.
The Twitter account of White House COVID-19 Data Director Dr. Cyrus Shahpar is an excellent source of updates on all things federal pandemic data. But this past Wednesday, Shahpar’s account took on a new purpose: tech support for the CDC’s dashboard.
It is now over a year into the U.S.’s vaccine rollout, and the CDC is still failing to publicly share data on vaccinations by state and race/ethnicity. I actually wrote a callout post about this in March 2021, and nothing has changed since then!
Kentucky has made some changes to its COVID-19 data reporting, including the end of a vaccine demographics report and some very low-quality data visualizations.
As state leaders drop COVID-19 safety measures right and left, I wanted to give a shout-out to Hawaii: the one state that has kept its indoor mask mandate in place during this time.
This past week, my girlfriend and I had a very unseasonal beach vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I was glad to see the town currently has a mask mandate and requires vaccination for indoor dining.