Category: Source spotlight

I visited Maine this week, so it seems fitting to evaluate the state’s COVID-19 dashboard on my way home.

Maine was actually one of my favorite state dashboards for a while. Everything is on one page. A summary section at the top makes it easy to see all the most important numbers, and then there’s a tabbed panel with mini-pages on trends and demographic data. It’s all fairly easy to navigate, and although there was a period of a few weeks where Maine’s demographic data tab never loaded for me, I never held that against the state. Maine has a clear data timestamp, and it was also one of the first states to properly separate out PCR and antibody testing numbers.

Now, however, Maine is lumping PCR and antigen tests. This means that counts of these two test are being combined in a single figure. Both PCR and antigen tests are diagnostic, but they have differing sensitivities and serve different purposes, and should be reported separately; to combine them may lead to inaccurate test positivity calculations and other issues. I expect this type of misleading reporting from, say, Florida or Rhode Island, but not from Maine. Be better, Maine!

It is not uncommon, as we increasingly realize that COVID-19 is not going away any time soon, for state public health departments to give their websites makeovers. Hastily-compiled pages and PDF reports have given way to complex dashboards, complete with interactive charts and color-coding.

These revamps can be helpful for users who would rather click through a menu than scroll through a report. But from a data collection perspective, it’s often challenging to go from a document or single page (where I could easily hit Ctrl+F to find a value) to a dashboard which requires clicking and searching through numerous popups.

The most recent state to go through such a revision is South Carolina. In late August, the state released a new dashboard, called the County-Level Dashboard, and reorganized much of its information on COVID-19 demographics and other metrics.

In fact, when I first looked at South Carolina’s revised pages, I could not find any demographic data at all. This information used to be reported on a page marked “Demographic Data by Case”; now, that page goes to a dashboard on cases in South Carolina’s long-term care facilities. It wasn’t until I read through the public health department’s new Navigation Manual that I realized demographic data are now integrated on the county dashboard. If I click, for example, “Go to cases,” I’m brought to a page reporting case rates by county, age, race, ethnicity, and gender.

To South Carolina’s credit, these new pages report demographic data in whole numbers, a more precise format than the percents of total cases and deaths released by many other states (and by SC itself before this reorganization). I also appreciate the addition of a Navigation Manual—such detailed instructions can help make a dashboard more accessible.

But I would advise any designers of state dashboard revamps to consider how to label figures more clearly from the get-go, so that journalists and state residents alike aren’t confused.

New Jersey reports COVID-19 demographic data in three different places.

First: there are confirmed case summary reports, released in PDF form. These reports include pie charts that break down COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations according to race and ethnicity, age group, and gender. A case summary report was last released on July 30.

Second: there is a “demographics” tab on New Jersey’s dashboard, which includes tables on COVID-19 deaths by race and ethnicity, age group, and underlying conditions. This tab currently lags the main dashboard significantly; the tables add up to about 11,000 deaths, while New Jersey has reported about 1,600 deaths total.

And third: there is a “case and mortality summaries” tab on the dashboard, which replicates the format of the old PDF reports with some confusing navigation. (Two rows of tabs at the top, and another row of tabs at the bottom? Who designed this? Who hurt them?)

New Mexico reports COVID-19 death demographics in a way that makes me suspect they have it out for us at the COVID Racial Data Tracker specifically.

The state occasionally includes race and ethnicity information for deaths in its Modeling Updates, released once a week. I say “occasionally” because there is no rhyme or reason to when this key demographic information makes it into the update. And there is also no rhyme or reason to how these data are presented:

This chart is from the Modeling Update released on June 9. Yes, you’re reading it right: those are percentages, expressed in a line chart. Some of the points don’t even have data labels.

New Mexico’s newest Modeling Update, released this past Tuesday, has shown a slight improvement in the state’s data presentation: the percentages are now expressed in bar charts, and total deaths for each racial group are included below the graph. (See page 20 of the PDF.) Still, in order to present a complete picture of how COVID-19 is impacting minorities in New Mexico, the state must release these data regularly and include precise figures.