COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Category: State data

  • Vaccination is a logistics problem

    Earlier this week, I got a frantic email from my grandma. She wanted my help in finding a vaccination appointment. She’d talked to her primary care provider and looked at her state public health agency’s website, but wasn’t sure how to actually secure her own spot in line. She lives in California, which is still officially in Phase 1A (vaccinating healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents), but is allowing some providers to start vaccinating seniors and essential workers based on “available supply.”

    My uncle did help my grandma get an appointment—one month from now and an hour’s drive away. Despite living in Berkeley, near several research universities, she’ll be heading to Palo Alto for her shots. I told her to keep a close eye on her county public health department’s website in case something becomes available there (which would be my advice to anyone else in this position), but I couldn’t guarantee that she’d be able to find an appointment any closer than the one she has now.

    And she’s not alone: a lot of grandmas are having trouble getting vaccination appointments. In fact, recent survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the majority of American seniors “do not have enough information about when and where they will be able to get the vaccine.” Black, Hispanic, and low income adults also report not having enough information about vaccinations, according to KFF. The minority communities that continue to be heavily impacted by the pandemic are supposed to be first in line for vaccines, but barriers to information and technology—particularly to vaccine registration portals—are leaving them behind once again.

    It would be easy to say the problem here is a lack of vaccine doses. But that’s not exactly it. The federal government is distributing millions of doses each week, and many of those doses are making it into arms: according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker, an average of 1.1 million shots were reported each day this past week. By sheer numbers, we are already on track to meet President Biden’s 100 million vaccinations in 100 days goal.

    Our current problem is, in fact, a logistics one. It’s a build up of infrastructure failures, with all the weight falling on those underfunded local public health departments I mentioned in the previous section. Right now, these public health workers are trying to set up vaccination appointments, while also dealing with constantly-changing information from their state on how many doses they will get, while also stretching out a depleted budget, while also probably short on personnel because half of their staff quit or got COVID-19 in 2020, while also dealing with backlash from their communities, while also fielding endless calls from confused grandmas… and all of this while still testing, contact tracing, and communicating basic pandemic safety measures. Whew. I got tired just writing that sentence.

    Some dimensions of this problem, such as the funding and lack of community trust, are years in the making. But there’s one piece the federal government may be able to solve soon, and it’s a data issue. The federal government is not giving states—and by extension, local public health agencies—enough lead time to coordinate their vaccine distribution. ProPublica reporters Caroline Chen, Isaac Arnsdorf and Ryan Gabrielson explained the situation in a detailed feature this week: unpredictable shipments at the national level mean that vaccine providers are unable to use up all of their shots in some weeks and cancelling appointments in others. The whole piece is worth reading, but I want to highlight the one quotation near the end:

    Starting Wednesday, it will be up to the Biden administration to provide clear visibility for states, according to a member of the president-elect’s COVID-19 team, who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the new administration.

    “The government can point at the manufacturer, but it’s like asking the [Defense Department], ‘How many planes do you have?’ and them saying, ‘I don’t know, ask Boeing,’” the person said.

    Reporters at POLITICO similarly found that public health workers simply don’t trust the dose allocation system. While the Biden administration may want to ramp up vaccine production in order to vaccinate more Americans, this goal may be more easily achieved by ensuring vaccines are properly tracked. At every part of the vaccination pipeline, stakeholders should know how many doses they’re getting and when. Shipments should be predictable, and appointments should be easily managed, freeing up public health workers’ time to take on the important task of actually vaccinating people.

    And there are still holes in our data on who’s getting vaccinated, too. Only 23 states are reporting vaccinations by race and ethnicity; this is an improvement from last week, but still a far cry from comprehensive data collection. Another ProPublica investigation, meanwhile, found that many states aren’t requiring providers to report vaccine doses that go wasted, making it difficult to see a comprehensive picture of the shots that get spoiled or thrown in the trash.

    It also bears mentioning that Pfizer will now be shipping out fewer vaccine vials to account for the “surprise 6th dose” that providers are often able to get out of each vial—since Pfizer charges by the dose. It is unclear whether this reduction in dose availability will affect the rollout.

    One piece of good news, on the vaccination data front: the CDC vaccination tracker stepped up its reporting to include weekend updates, as of yesterday. But the agency still isn’t reporting demographic data, comprehensive data on long-term care facilities, or even a time series of doses administered per day. Vaccination tracking has a long way to go.

    Related posts

    • Sources and updates, November 12
      Sources and updates for the week of November 12 include new vaccination data, a rapid test receiving FDA approval, treatment guidelines, and more.
    • How is the CDC tracking the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines?
      Following the end of the federal public health emergency in May, the CDC has lost its authority to collect vaccination data from all state and local health agencies that keep immunization records. As a result, the CDC is no longer providing comprehensive vaccination numbers on its COVID-19 dashboards. But we still have some information about this year’s vaccination campaign, thanks to continued CDC efforts as well as reporting by other health agencies and research organizations.
    • Sources and updates, October 8
      Sources and updates for the week of October 8 include new papers about booster shot uptake, at-home tests, and Long COVID symptoms.
    • COVID source shout-out: Novavax’s booster is now available
      This week, the FDA authorized Novavax’s updated COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s why some people are excited to get Novavax’s vaccine this fall, as opposed to Pfizer’s or Moderna’s.
  • Only 19 states report vaccinations by race/ethnicity

    Only 19 states report vaccinations by race/ethnicity

    Every week, I come into your inbox and I say, the vaccine rollout is going badly.  And you’re probably like, yeah, Betsy, I know, it’s on the news every single day.

    You probably don’t need me to tell you about the announcement this past Tuesday, from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, telling states to stop saving their second doses and start prioritizing all adults over the age of 65… or the Washington Post scoop this past Friday, revealing that states couldn’t actually vaccinate more people because the federal vaccine reserve was already used up. (I salute all the policy reporters following this madness. Seriously.)

    So instead, today, I’m focusing on a vaccination issue that hasn’t gotten as much press: who is actually getting vaccinated? On the national level, we largely can’t answer this question, thanks to a lack of demographic data.

    While the CDC’s vaccination tracker has seen some upgrades recently (such as the inclusion of people receiving two doses and downloadable data), it does not report any information on the race, ethnicity, age, gender, or occupation of those Americans who have gotten shots. And the data aren’t much better at the state level, according to recent analysis from the COVID Tracking Project. 

    The COVID Tracking Project analysis discusses 17 states which report race and/or ethnicity data for vaccine recipients. Since the post was published, two more states—Missouri and West Virginia—have started reporting such data. Still, just reporting these data isn’t sufficient. Alice Goldfarb, Kara Schechtman, Charlotte Minsky, and other Project volunteers who compiled detailed annotations on the vaccine metrics reported by each state found that, even when states do report demographic data, each state uses vastly different categories, making it difficult to compare or combine this state-level information into a useful national dataset.

    See the CDD’s updated annotations on both state and national vaccine data sources here.

    Using the limited data that are available, though, we can still see that the vaccination effort thus far is incredibly inequitable—despite government promises to prioritize vulnerable populations.

    White Americans are getting vaccinated at much higher rates than Black Americans, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of state data published yesterday. Reporters Hannah Recht and Lauren Weber discuss access issues and mistrust of the healthcare system—tied to systematic racism against Black Americans seeking healthcare—as reasons why Black Americans may be left behind.

    But the disparities so far, at a stage of the vaccine rollout that has largely prioritized healthcare workers, means that both national and local public health agencies have a lot of work to do:

    “My concern now is if we don’t vaccinate the population that’s highest-risk, we’re going to see even more disproportional deaths in Black and brown communities,” said Dr. Fola May, a UCLA physician and health equity researcher. “It breaks my heart.”

    In New York—a state which finally released a vaccine dashboard today, but is not yet reporting demographic data—vaccination trends by hospital suggest a similar pattern. The hospitals with the highest shares of vaccinated workers are, by and large, private hospitals located in Manhattan. The hospitals with fewer vaccinated workers, on the other hand, include those located in Harlem, Brooklyn, and other working-class neighborhoods.

    Data are also lacking for long-term care facilities. The CDC reports total vaccine doses administered in these facilities (which include nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other care homes). But a national total is unhelpful in analyzing where states have been most successful at getting vaccines to this high-priority population. A COVID Tracking Project analysis, published on Thursday, found vaccine data for LTCs in only seven states. South Carolina is the only state releasing detailed data on individual facilities.

    Meanwhile, CVS has published a state-by-state dataset of LTC vaccinations administered by this pharmacy chain. The COVID Tracking Project reports that Walgreens may release a similar dataset. It seems pretty wild that independent pharmacy chains are reporting more detailed vaccine data than the federal government itself—until you remember, well, how data reporting has gone this entire pandemic.

    Vaccination data, right now, are about as messy as testing data were back in spring 2020. Every state is doing its own thing, and the federal government has yet to provide sufficiently detailed information for meaningful analysis. Readers: I urge you to push for better vaccine demographic data, both in your own region and nationally.

    A few more vaccine data updates:

    • Sources and updates, November 12
      Sources and updates for the week of November 12 include new vaccination data, a rapid test receiving FDA approval, treatment guidelines, and more.
    • How is the CDC tracking the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines?
      Following the end of the federal public health emergency in May, the CDC has lost its authority to collect vaccination data from all state and local health agencies that keep immunization records. As a result, the CDC is no longer providing comprehensive vaccination numbers on its COVID-19 dashboards. But we still have some information about this year’s vaccination campaign, thanks to continued CDC efforts as well as reporting by other health agencies and research organizations.
    • Sources and updates, October 8
      Sources and updates for the week of October 8 include new papers about booster shot uptake, at-home tests, and Long COVID symptoms.
    • COVID source shout-out: Novavax’s booster is now available
      This week, the FDA authorized Novavax’s updated COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s why some people are excited to get Novavax’s vaccine this fall, as opposed to Pfizer’s or Moderna’s.
  • Schools are reopening (again), but we still can’t track them

    Schools are reopening (again), but we still can’t track them

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    K-12 schools across the country are open for the spring semester, even as America faces serious outbreaks in almost every state and a more contagious strain—more contagious for both children and adults—begins to spread. At the national level, we are still overwhelmingly unable to track how the virus is spreading in these settings.

    Perhaps the most newsworthy opening this week was in Chicago, where students returned to classrooms for the first time since last March. Chicago’s teachers union has waged an ongoing battle with Mayor Lori Lightfoot and district CEO Janice Jackson, whom teachers claim have not resolved ongoing safety issues in school buildings. The district is screening staff through optional rapid tests once a month; about 1,200 tests have been reported so far, including three positive results. Four Chicago students and 34 other staff members reported COVID-19 cases this week.

    Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden announced a $175 billion plan aimed at getting students back to in-person learning. The plan includes $35 billion for higher education and $130 billion for public K-12 schools, with a focus on increasing testing, PPE for students and teachers, ventilation, and other safety measures for which educators have been calling since last spring.

    Biden hopes to open “the majority of K-8 schools,” according to Education Week’s Evie Blad. A recent report by the CDC suggests that in-person learning for these younger students, when implemented safely, is not likely to seed an outbreak in the wider community. (College-aged students in the 18-24 range are more likely to cause such outbreaks.)

    The report says: “CDC recommends that K–12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely.”

    But, as Blad points out, it will be difficult to track the impact that more school reopening would have on broader communities, as data on COVID-19 cases in schools are still limited and fractured. There is still no federal dataset on COVID-19 in American public schools. State datasets are fully unstandardized; and most states only report case counts, making it difficult to actually analyze how school outbreaks compare across schools.

    As of our most recent K-12 state annotation update, only Delaware, New York, and Texas are providing enrollment numbers, and only New York is providing testing numbers.  (Thank you to intern Sarah Braner for doing the update this week!)

    In last week’s recommended reading section, I featured an op ed in Nature by school data leader Emily Oster calling on President-elect Biden to develop a unified, national system for tracking COVID-19 in schools. I wanted to highlight it again this week because I absolutely agree with Oster here. As important as her and others’ compilation efforts have been in filling the school data gap, no outside dashboard can replace the work of the federal government:

    We need to be able to identify the virus spreading in schools and work out what went wrong. The data we do have suggest that outbreaks in schools are not common, but they do happen. We need a way to find them systematically.

    As far as I can tell, there is no mention of data-gathering in Biden’s K-12 COVID-19 plan.

    And here’s one more school-related metric we should be tracking: teachers are starting to get vaccinated. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of state vaccination priority groups, 31 states have put K-12 and childcare personnel in their Phase 1 group. In Utah, teachers and childcare workers are even included in Phase 1A. California and New York, two of the biggest states, started vaccinating teachers this past week.

    (If you want a heartwarming read this long weekend, I recommend this piece from THE CITY that profiles NYC teachers and other essential workers getting vaccinated in the middle of the night.)

    But most states are barely reporting basic demographic data for their vaccinations, much less telling the public the occupations of those who have gotten shots. Without knowing how many teachers have been vaccinated, it will be difficult to factor these inoculations into reopening decisions—or determine how vaccination impacts future school outbreaks.

    more K-12 schools content
  • We’re not doing enough sequencing to detect B.1.1.7

    We’re not doing enough sequencing to detect B.1.1.7

    The CDC has identified 63 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant as of Jan. 8, but this is likely a significant undercount thanks to the nation’s lack of systematic sequencing.

    A new, more transmissible strain of COVID-19 (known as B.1.1.7) has caused quite a stir these past few weeks. It surfaced in the United Kingdom and has been detected in eight states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The fact that a mutant strain happened isn’t a surprise, as RNA viruses mutate quite often. But as vaccines roll out, the spread of a new strain is yet another reminder that we’re nowhere near out of the woods yet.  

    It’s entirely possible to differentiate between strains of SARS-CoV-2 through genetic testing. To detect the B.1.1.7 variant, COVID-19 positive samples can be sequenced to search for a telltale deletion in the virus’s RNA. And in theory, we could track the spread of this variant with good testing data. A truly robust tracking effort should include a centralized surveillance program to sequence the RNA of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in all positive cases—or at least a good sample—to detect any mutant strains and track their impact. However, this is an area where the US has consistently faltered: as of December 23rd, only 51,212 out of 18 million positive cases had been sequenced. 

    As with most of the government’s response, handling this seems to be mostly up to the states. According to releases from Colorado, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Texas, it looks like these states are making sequencing efforts. Georgia said, “The variant was discovered during analysis of a specimen sent by a pharmacy in Georgia to a commercial lab”, which I can only assume means they have been conducting some kind of sequencing effort. I couldn’t find references to the extent of sequencing efforts in the announcements from California, Florida, or New York. 

    From these releases, it’s obvious that there is no unified cross-state effort. Pennsylvania stated that they had been sending “10-35 random samples biweekly to the CDC since November to study sequencing,” but that’s not going to be nearly enough to track this more transmissible variant. Are there any plans to ramp up sequencing? And that’s just from Pennsylvania because they deigned to tell us—are all states going to ramp up sequencing? It’s just not clear. 

    And after all that, starting to test for the variant now still won’t tell us just how widespread it is. The first case in New York was in someone with no evident travel history. Indeed, this is true for most people who have been infected, and, per Dr. Angela Rasmussen in Buzzfeed News, this suggests that the variant is already circulating in the community. To know how widespread the variant is, we would need to retroactively test samples that had already tested positive. Colorado’s press release mentioned that they would be doing some retroactive testing, but what about the other seven states? 

    Plus, that’s just states with already confirmed cases—there absolutely will be more confirmed cases in other states, because if it is already present in the community, there probably already are cases in other states. To know just where this variant is, every positive test in the US stretching back months into the past would have to be retroactively re-tested for the variant—an unlikely occurrence. 

    Even if there were a coordinated effort to retroactively sequence all positive tests, some cases of the variant could still slip through the cracks, because most states still aren’t doing enough PCR testing as it is. As of January 8th, according to Ashish Jha’s team at the Brown University School of Public Health, 86% of states aren’t meeting their testing targets. (Meeting testing targets indicates that enough testing is happening to “identify most people reporting symptoms and at least two of their close contacts.” State targets on this dashboard were last configured on October 1, so keep that in mind.) Only two states where the variant has surfaced, Connecticut and New York, are meeting their targets—and cases are surging in both states right now. Longtime readers are going to be very familiar with this problem, but if any new people are reading, this means that in most states we don’t even know how widespread our “garden variety” COVID-19 is. So how are we supposed to know where the UK variant is if we can’t even keep track of the virus that’s been here for almost a year? 

    Beyond testing, even reporting on confirmed cases of the variant is spotty at best. The CDC is reporting how many detected cases of COVID-19 have been caused by the variant, but no state with a confirmed case caused by B.1.1.7 is displaying that data on their dashboard. (I checked the 8 states’ dashboards and left a comment on California’s because the ask box was right there.) Why is this not on their dashboards? I couldn’t tell you, but it seems like important information that should be reported.

    All of these unanswered questions show, yet again, that we desperately need a unified effort from the federal government to track and combat this virus. It should not be this hard to find how we’re tracking the spread of this variant, it should not be this hard to tell which methods work for even identifying the variant, and it should at least be possible to find this data on state health dashboards. It might look like we’re close to the finish line as vaccines continue to be distributed, but we’re tripping over the exact same problems we did at the beginning. 

    more testing data
  • Vaccine confusion abounds—and this is the easy stage

    Vaccine confusion abounds—and this is the easy stage

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    It’s been one month since the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was authorized for use in the U.S. Since then, about 22 million Pfizer and Moderna doses have been distributed—and at least 6.7 million of those have actually made it into people’s arms, according to the CDC. (The CDC is not yet tracking second doses.)

    Despite the federal government’s intense push to get vaccines through safety trials, that “last mile” step—from the Pfizer and Moderna factories to people’s arms—has been under-planned and underfunded. In the past month, we’ve been shocked by news stories ranging from a Wisconsin medical employee “intentionally removing” doses from a refrigerator to a local journalist in Florida individually helping over 150 seniors register for vaccination appointments. 

    State public health departments, already overwhelmed from ten months of running every other aspect of pandemic response, needed more money and resources to simultaneously coordinate millions of vaccinations and communicate their importance. The needed money didn’t come until this month, and recommendations from the federal government have left a lot of room for interpretation—leaving state and local health agencies scrambling.

    And this first month was supposed to be the easy part! As The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang explains, early U.S. vaccination efforts were aimed at easy-to-reach people: those in hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term care facilities. In these locations, it’s easy to quickly identify the most vulnerable patients and get them registered for vaccination appointments. The next groups of eligible Americans will not be so easy to reach. Doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and many other businesses will need to figure out vaccine logistics while also ramping up campaigns to convince people to even get vaccinated in the first place.

    (For a plain-language explanation of this issue that you can send to confused friends and relatives, I highly recommend the latest episode of the Sawbones podcast with Dr. Sydnee McElroy and Justin McElroy.)

    When I updated my vaccine data annotations yesterday, I added notes on how the vaccine rollout is progressing in each state. For the 38 states (and D.C.) now reporting vaccinations, you’ll find two new fields: the state’s vaccination phase (1A, 1B, etc.; 31 states are reporting this) and any prominently featured information on how residents can get vaccinated, such as a registration portal or contact information for local public health departments (at least 12 states are doing this).

    Please note that, while most states do not yet have state-wide vaccine registration portals, many local public health departments are setting up such portals at the regional and county level. I highly recommend searching for your local public health agency to see what they have available. Also, New Mexico, which has a registration portal but no vaccine data dashboard, is not included in the annotations.

    State data availability (as of Jan. 9)

    • 39 jurisdictions are reporting some form of COVID-19 vaccination data on a dedicated page or dashboard
    • 16 states are reporting race and ethnicity of vaccinated residents
    • 20 states are reporting age of vaccinated residents
    • 17 states are reporting gender or sex of vaccinated residents
    • 20 states are reporting vaccinations by county or a similar local jurisdiction
    • 31 states are reporting their vaccination phase (1A, 1B, etc.)
    • 12 states are prominently featuring information on how residents can get vaccinated, such as a registration portal or contact information for local public health departments

    More vaccine data news

    • Jurisdictions with new vaccine dashboards or pages include: Arkansas, Arizona, California, Washington D.C., Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
    • The CDC’s vaccination data are now available for download, via a table beneath the interactive dashboard. The agency updated its state-by-state data every weekday this past week—an improvement from the past two holiday weeks. A time series isn’t yet available, though.
    • Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker now has time series for both individual states and several countries which have begun administering vaccines. The states currently leading the pack for vaccinations per capita in the U.S. are West Virginia, the Dakotas, and Maine.
    • KFF has updated its COVID-19 Vaccination Monitor with polling data on vaccine hesitancy in rural America. Compared to urban and suburban residents, the foundation found, rural residents are significantly more hesitant. 31% of the rural residents sampled said they would “definitely get” a vaccine, compared to over 40% in other categories. Rural residents are also more likely to say they’re “not worried” that they or someone in their family will get sick with COVID-19.
    • NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin and Pien Huang surveyed experts to determine several major ways the U.S. could “jump start its sluggish vaccine rollout.” These include: more money for state and local health departments, more vaccine types (hopefully some easier-to-transport brands), massive administration sites, more regular supplies from the federal government, and public awareness campaigns.
    • The Trump administration is speeding up at least one thing: a plan to help pharmacies administer COVID-19 vaccines. According to POLITICO’s Rachel Roubein, almost 40,000 pharmacies are involved in the federal program, including those part of the Costco, Rite Aid, and Walmart chains. Pharmacies which are already used to administering flu vaccines each year—and already have huge patient databases—are strong candidates for the next phase of vaccine rollout.  
    • After some classic infighting from Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York state is moving to Phase 1B—meaning seniors and essential workers will start to see vaccinations. However, as City Councilmember Mark Levine pointed out on Twitter, the city has: “One website for H+H sites, another for DOHMH sites, another for Costco. For community clinics, 7 have their own different websites, 4 require calling, and 1 is by email.” (I want to get vaccinated at Costco, personally, if the opportunity arises.)
    • A Twitter thread from KFF Senior Vice President Jen Kates points out more of the methods states and counties are using to get residents signed up for vaccination appointments. They range from the expected online portals to SurveyMonkey and Eventbrite.

    Related posts

    • Sources and updates, November 12
      Sources and updates for the week of November 12 include new vaccination data, a rapid test receiving FDA approval, treatment guidelines, and more.
    • How is the CDC tracking the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines?
      Following the end of the federal public health emergency in May, the CDC has lost its authority to collect vaccination data from all state and local health agencies that keep immunization records. As a result, the CDC is no longer providing comprehensive vaccination numbers on its COVID-19 dashboards. But we still have some information about this year’s vaccination campaign, thanks to continued CDC efforts as well as reporting by other health agencies and research organizations.
    • Sources and updates, October 8
      Sources and updates for the week of October 8 include new papers about booster shot uptake, at-home tests, and Long COVID symptoms.
    • COVID source shout-out: Novavax’s booster is now available
      This week, the FDA authorized Novavax’s updated COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s why some people are excited to get Novavax’s vaccine this fall, as opposed to Pfizer’s or Moderna’s.

  • School data update, Jan. 3

    Many school districts across the nation will once again open for in-person instruction later this month. But data on how COVID-19 spreads in schools remain inadequate.

    At the request of one of my readers, I’ve updated my annotations of state K-12 data reporting, first published on December 6. The annotations are posted on a new resource page, which also includes notes on the four major national sources for COVID-19 school data.  I’ll be updating this page every two weeks.

    Here’s how the state data stand, as of January 1:

    • 34 states and the District of Columbia are reporting COVID-19 cases in K-12 schools, in some form
    • 7 states are reporting incomplete data on school outbreaks or cases in school-aged children
    • 20 states are separating out school case counts by students and staff
    • 5 states are reporting deaths linked to school outbreaks
    • 1 state is reporting COVID-19 tests conducted for school students and staff (New York)
    • 2 states are reporting in-person enrollment (New York and Texas)
    K-12 data annotations

    Related posts

    • COVID-19 school data remain sporadic
      On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. The NYC schools discrepancy is indicative of an American education system that is still not collecting adequate data on how COVID-19 is impacting classrooms—much less using these data in a consistent manner.
  • CDC now reporting a vaccination count (and other updates)

    CDC now reporting a vaccination count (and other updates)

    Screenshot of Bloomberg’s COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker, taken on December 26.

    Despite the holiday, many jurisdictions have begun reporting COVID-19 vaccination data since my last issue. Here are the major updates:

    • CDC added vaccinations to its dashboard: Mere hours after I published last week’s newsletter questioning when the federal government would release a national count of how many Americans had been vaccinated, the CDC began posting just that. The CDC COVID Data Tracker now includes both a count of how many vaccine doses have been distributed and a count of how many people have received their first dose—1.9 million as of Saturday, December 26. The count includes both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines, and incorporates reporting from states, local public health agencies, and federal entities including the Bureau of Prisons, Veterans Administration, and Indian Health Services. More detailed geographic and demographic data are not yet available from the CDC.
    • 27 states are now reporting COVID-19 vaccination data: While the COVID Tracking Project is not tracking vaccinations, the Project is keeping a running list of states that are reporting vaccine-related metrics. As of December 25, 27 states are reporting vaccine doses administered or another similar metric. Of the states reporting vaccinations, nine are reporting race and ethnicity of the residents vaccinated—that’s a huge jump from last Sunday, when only Florida was reporting this information. In other demographic metrics: 14 states are reporting age of those vaccinated, 10 are reporting sex or gender, and 14 are reporting county.
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    • How the COVID Tracking Project hopes vaccines will be tracked: In addition to its state dashboard annotations, the Project released a blog post last week detailing key information that Project leads believe should be prioritized by state and federal public health departments, as well as what states are reporting so far. Key metrics include: the number of people fully vaccinated (not just the number of doses administered), demographic data reported in absolute numbers (not percentages), county-level data, and data on vaccinations in long-term care facilities.
    • New Mexico will notify residents when they qualify for vaccination: This past Wednesday, the New Mexico Department of Health launched a website where state residents can sign up to learn when they will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The sign-up form is currently somewhat confusing to use, as a new user must click “Schedule a New Appointment” to put in their contact details—even if they aren’t eligible for vaccination yet. Still, this effort to provide transparency about vaccination progress on such an individual level is unique among states thus far.
    • Our World in Data is tracking COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide: As of December 26, the open-source data repository Our World in Data is compiling vaccination counts from 10 countries: the U.S., the U.K., China, Russia, Israel, Canada, Bahrain, Chile, Mexico, and Costa Rica. So far, the U.S. has administered the most doses at 1.9 million, while Bahrain has administered the most doses when adjusted for population, at 3 doses for every 100 people.
    • Initial COVID-19 vaccine data in North Carolina reveals racial disparities: Samantha Kummerer, reporter for ABC11 in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, used the state’s early demographic data to draw attention to healthcare disparity. “When compared to the overall population of North Carolina, both Black and Latino communities are severely underrepresented in COVID-19 vaccination data,” Kummerer writes. She goes on to explain that these data reflect the hospital workforce in North Carolina, which was the first group to be vaccinated—and which is overwhelmingly white. This story reflects why it is so important for states to be transparent about their vaccination demographics, even at such an early stage of vaccine deployment.
    more vaccine coverage

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  • 15 states are reporting COVID-19 vaccination data—federal government lags behind

    15 states are reporting COVID-19 vaccination data—federal government lags behind

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    Back in September, I read the Interim COVID-19 Vaccination Playbook released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the first national plan for how vaccination was supposed to proceed. Here’s an excerpt from my newsletter issue covering this playbook:

    Once COVID-19 vaccination begins, the CDC will report national vaccination data on a dashboard similar to the agency’s existing flu vaccination dashboard. According to the playbook, this dashboard will include estimates of the critical populations that will be prioritized for vaccination, locations of CDC-approved vaccine providers and their available supplies, and counts of how many vaccines have been administered.

    This past week, the first COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to frontline healthcare workers across the country. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorization to a second vaccine. But I haven’t seen a vaccination dashboard from the CDC; the closest we’ve come so far is a dataset listing initial allocations of Pfizer doses for every state. This federal agency is lagging behind several states that are making their vaccination counts public, as well as journalists who have already begun to compile the limited information that’s available.

    Here’s how the reporting of vaccination data is supposed to work. When someone goes in to get their COVID-19 shot, the provider of that shot will enter their name and other personal information to a state registry called an Immunization Information System, or IIS. Vaccine providers that issue shots and send data may include hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, pop-up vaccination sites, and any other institution that is giving shots.

    Most states and several large cities, like New York City, have these immunization registries; New Hampshire is still getting its registry ready to track COVID-19 vaccines. The registries stay private, with data only available for the people who ship, administer, and manage vaccines. A data system called the IZ gateway will help different state immunization systems link up with each other and with the CDC, which has asked all states to formally agree to share their data with this federal agency. (The CDC has asked states to share a pretty extensive list of data points for each vaccine patient, including names and addresses, which some states are not willing to send.)

    The CDC has also developed a system to help vaccine providers manage supplies and patients, a public-facing website that will help Americans see where they can get vaccinated, and a new software that will pull all vaccine-related information into one place for Operation Warp Speed officials to use. Finally, an HHS data system called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System will collect information on patient reactions to the vaccines, such as headaches and fatigue—both of which are expected reactions to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

    For more detail on these data systems, see this article by USA TODAY’s Aleszu Bajak and Janet Loehrke, which I drew upon to write this part of the newsletter.

    Theoretically, the CDC should have precise counts of how many people have received vaccine doses in every state, as well as personal identifying information for all of those people. So far, however, it appears that many states are beginning to make these data public, while the federal government has yet to release national numbers.

    According to ongoing analysis by the COVID Tracking Project, 15 states are reporting some form of vaccination data as of December 19. Here’s the breakdown:

    • Five states have added a count of vaccine doses administered as a single metric on their dashboards: Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
    • Two states have added vaccination-specific pages to their dashboards: South Dakota and Utah.
    • Three states have built entirely new dashboards for vaccination: Michigan, Ohio, and Texas.
    • Florida is releasing daily vaccination reports.
    • Four states are reporting vaccine-related metrics (such as counts of approved providers and doses delivered) that don’t yet include actual counts of the doses administered: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Tennessee.
    • Five states are reporting some form of demographic data: Michigan reports vaccinations by age; Texas reports by county; Utah reports by local health jurisdiction; Ohio reports by age and county; South Dakota reports by age, gender, and county; and Florida reports by race, age, gender, and county.

    For links to all of these states’ dashboards and reports, see the COVID Tracking Project’s annotations.

    Florida is the only state to report vaccination counts broken down by race so far, though the state has not yet reported such counts for different ethnicities. Public health experts have widely agreed that people of color—especially Black Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans—should be prioritized in COVID-19 vaccination because these communities have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. But without knowing vaccination rates in these vulnerable communities, it will be impossible to determine whether they are receiving the medical treatment they deserve.

    A recent article by ProPublica’s Caroline Chen, Ryan Gabrielson, and Topher Sanders calls attention to the lack of standardization that currently exists for state collection of race and ethnicity data:

    In state vaccination registries, race and ethnicity fields are simply considered “nice to have,” explained Mitchel Rothholz, chief of governance and state affiliates for the American Pharmacists Association. While other fields are mandatory, such as the patient’s contact information and date of birth, leaving race and ethnicity blank “won’t keep a provider from submitting the data if they don’t have it.”

    In other words, if a Black woman gets the Moderna vaccine at a Walgreens in Brooklyn, she could feel uncomfortable disclosing her race on the pharmacy’s form—and little action would be taken to explain to her why such disclosure is important and how her information would be used. The “race” checkbox on her form would be left blank. She would likely go uncounted by researchers and journalists trying to hold the government accountable to its promises of equity.

    The federal government should be both more rigorous in requiring race and ethnicity data and more transparent in disclosing these data—but I’d take a simple, national count of how many people in America have received COVID-19 shots to start. Recent data releases from the HHS have made me pretty optimistic about the federal public health agency’s ability to be transparent (see: the next two sections of this issue.) But the lack of a federal dataset so far means that key COVID-19 information is once again scattered.

    In a Poynter webinar last week, Al Thompkins asked a panel of top infectious disease experts—including scientists on both the FDA’s and the CDC’s vaccine advisory panels—a simple question: Will the public be able to see counts of how many people are getting vaccinated? None of those experts had a clear answer. There may be a dashboard in the works behind the scenes of which the panelists hadn’t been informed, but their responses still did not inspire confidence.

    Of course, journalists are once again stepping in to cobble together vaccination counts from all the public sources they can find. Bloomberg has counted 211,000 Pfizer doses in the U.S., as of December 19, by compiling numbers from state websites, press conferences, and interviews. The New York Times has surveyed state public health departments. Benjy Renton continues to update a Tableau dashboard that compares planned Pfizer and Moderna shipments to state populations.

    And the Kaiser Family Foundation released its COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor, an ongoing project to track public perception of and experiences with vaccination. The latest survey from this monitor shows that 71% of Americans would “definitely or probably” get a vaccine for COVID-19 if it was determined to be safe and freely available.

    This week, as I’ve seen the vaccination numbers—and the photos of frontline healthcare workers getting these well-deserved shots—I’ve felt something strange. Something hopeful. For the first time since March, I’m looking at numbers that I actually want to see go up. Now, if we could just get more comprehensive numbers, and get them more standardized, and get them reported with a priority on racial justice…

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  • Florida data scientist faces police break-in

    Florida data scientist faces police break-in

    In May, Rebekah Jones was fired from the Florida Department of Health. As a specialist in geographic information systems (GIS), she worked on the department’s COVID-19 dashboard; she claims that she was fired because she refused to manipulate data to look like Florida was in a better spot for reopening. After her firing, Jones started her own, independent Florida dashboard which includes more open information and methodology details. She also started the COVID Monitor, a school data tracking project which I have cited in previous newsletters.

    This past Monday, Florida state police raided Jones’ home. They seized her computer, which she had been using to update her Florida state and school data dashboards. They also pointed guns at her and her children.

    The Florida Department of Law Enforcement issued a search warrant against Jones, who is suspected of hacking into the state Emergency Response Team’s communications and sending an unauthorized message. Jones has stated that she believes this action was actually an attempt to silence her. She has been a vocal critic of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his mishandling of the pandemic in her state, as well as of school reopenings across the country.

    Whether the police raid was due to legitimate hacking concerns or political motivation, there should be no excuse for this type of violence:

    Thanks to this tweet—which quickly went viral—the raid against Jones became a national story. She’s appeared on several news networks and garnered sympathy from science communication leaders. Ron Filipkowski, a Florida attorney who was a longtime member of a committee to appoint judges in the state, resigned from his post in protest of this raid.

    The nation watched this spring and summer as journalists faced police violence while covering Black Lives Matter protests. Journalists were tear-gassed, shoved, and arrested, but continued to do their jobs. Like many of those journalists, Jones is dedicated to her data and her view of public accountability. Both of her dashboards have continued to update since Monday.

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  • COVID source callout: Wyoming

    COVID source callout: Wyoming

    Look, I like Wyoming’s COVID-19 dashboard. I like that it’s not actually one dashboard, but five dashboards—one for cases, one for deaths, one for tests, one for hospitals, one for county-level data—each of which has its own update schedule. I like that I need to hover over bars and download crosstabs in order to obtain precise figures. I like that sometimes the percentages add up to 100% and sometimes they don’t.

    I find it charming to need five or six tabs open every time I check the state. It’s a nice challenge. Those states that include all their data on one page, they make things too easy!