Illinois is the latest state to get its own dashboard for COVID-19 wastewater surveillance, with a new website that launched earlier this week. It includes data for 75 sites across the state.
For several days now, the New York City Department of Education’s COVID-19 case map has had a significant error: on this dashboard, a number of schools are erroneously located in Colombia. Like, the South American country.
This week, the National Institutes of Health launched a new website that allows people to anonymously report their at-home test results. While I’m skeptical about how much useful data will actually result from the site, it could be a helpful tool to gauge how willing Americans are to self-report test results.
I recently learned about the Kinsa HealthWeather dashboard, a resource providing COVID-19 risk estimates by state and county based on data from smart thermometers.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that the Science Writers conference—which I attended in-person—had great COVID-19 safety policies, better than other events I’ve gone to this year. To learn more about how this event’s organizers planned the conference and communicated policies to attendees, I talked to Tinsley Davis, executive director of the National Association of Science Writers.
I look at a lot of wastewater surveillance dashboards these days—sometimes reporting on this type of COVID-19 data, sometimes trying to gauge my own risk level. The New York State Wastewater Surveillance Network’s dashboard is one of my favorites, both because I like how it’s setup and because of location bias (i.e. I live in New York).
The CDC is now updating its COVID-19 cases and deaths data weekly, instead of daily. This shift goes beyond the agency’s public dashboard: the CDC has also archived datasets with state- and county-level data providing COVID-19 cases and deaths.
I’ve been to a few journalism conferences in 2022, along with other larger events, and Science Writers has the best COVID-19 safety protocols I have encountered so far. Shout-out to the organizers!
The CDC provided a fairly normal variant data update this week. Be wary of sensationalist Twitter personalities who want you to think some kind of conspiracy is going on.