COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Category: Uncategorized

  • Featured sources, May 9

    No new COVID-19 data sources caught my eye this week, so I dug into the archives for a couple of old favorites.

    • Household Pulse Survey by the U.S. Census (featured on 8/16/20): Starting at the end of April 2020, the U.S. Census has run a survey program to collect data on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the lives of American residents. The survey results include questions on education, employment, food security, health, and housing. The Census has now conducted three phases of this survey, going through April 2021.
    • Searchable database of federal COVID-19 purchases (featured on 12/13/20): Since March 2020, ProPublica has tracked where federal government spending on the pandemic is going. The database represents $38 billion, 17,734 government contracts, and 8,070 individual vendors as of May 7. Data can be sorted by spending categories, vendor types, and contract sizes.
    • COVID-19 diverse sources (featured on 3/28/21): NPR journalists from the organization’s Source of the Week project have compiled this database of COVID-19 experts from diverse backgrounds. The database is divided into 13 major categories, including virology, disease origin, health policy, racial/ethnic health disparities, and more.
    • HHS celebrity tracker (featured on 11/1/20): In late October, POLITICO’s Dan Diamond released an HHS document called the “PSA Celebrity Tracker,” which health officials were using to determine which of America’s favorite people may be useful in an ad campaign encouraging the nation to be less negative about COVID-19. (Here’s more context from POLITICO on the tracker.)

    All featured sources
  • National numbers, May 9

    National numbers, May 9

    In the past week (May 1 through 6), the U.S. reported about 321,000 new cases, according to the CDC. This amounts to:

    • An average of 46,000 new cases each day
    • 98 total new cases for every 100,000 Americans
    • 13% fewer new cases than last week (April 24-30)
    Nationwide COVID-19 metrics as of May 7, sourcing data from the CDC and HHS. Posted on Twitter by Conor Kelly.

    Last week, America also saw:

    • 32,500 new COVID-19 patients admitted to hospitals (10 for every 100,000 people)
    • 4,600 new COVID-19 deaths (1.4 for every 100,000 people)
    • 59.6% of new cases in the country now B.1.1.7-caused (as of April 10)
    • An average of 2.0 million vaccinations per day (per Bloomberg)

    The rate of new cases continues to drop: this is the first time we’ve seen an average under 50,000 daily cases since early October, 2020. Nationally, fewer than one in one thousand Americans was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week. Still, even after a couple of weeks of declines, case rates in Michigan and other Northeastern and Midwestern states remain at a concerning level: over 100 new cases per 100,000 people. 

    Hospitalization and death numbers have remained fairly constant for the last month. Between 4,000 and 5,000 new COVID-19 patients are admitted to the hospital each day; as I discussed in this recent story for Science News, younger patients (under age 50) are making up a larger share of those hospitalized than this age group did in earlier periods of the pandemic.

    The demographic change is, of course, thanks to vaccination. While about 43% of American adults are now fully vaccinated, an impressive 71% of seniors (over age 65) are fully vaccinated—and 84% of seniors have received at least one dose, as of May 8. Still, we have many shots in arms to go before reaching President Biden’s new goal: one dose for at least 70% of Americans by July 4.

    A recent update to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor shows how vaccine supply/demand tension is playing out across the country. Some states in the South and West with lower vaccinated shares of their populations are also administering new first doses at lower rates. In Mississippi, for example, only 41% of the population has received a first dose and the state is administering new first doses at a daily rate of 136 per 100,000. Overall, the U.S. is administering 2 million doses per day, way down from last month’s 3+ million peak.

    This past Wednesday, the Biden administration announced its support of waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines. The announcement garnered a lot of enthusiasm in the public health community, especially as cases continue to surge in India, other parts of Asia, and South America. But a lot of negotiations remain until vaccine technology can actually be shared with the world; if you’re looking for a detailed rundown, I recommend this issue of Geneva Health Files, a newsletter run by my former CUNY classmate Priti Patnaik.

    more national numbers

  • Featured sources, May 2

    • AHCJ resource on COVID-19 vaccine results: The Association for Health Care Journalists has added a section to its Medical Studies repository for studies on how well COVID-19 vaccines protect against infection. Tara Haelle, AHCJ’s medical core topic leader, compiled the studies; “The list is not necessarily exhaustive, but it includes the studies I was able to track down so far,” she writes in a blog post about this update.
    • Colleges requiring COVID-19 vaccinations (Chronicle): A growing number of colleges and universities are aiming to protect their students, professors, and staff by requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for those coming to campus next fall. The Chronicle of Higher Education has identified 190 such institutions as of April 30, and is continually updating its list. (Note: You need to sign up with a free account to view the page.)
    • Post-COVID Care Centers: Post-COVID Care Centers, or PCCCs, are clinics where long COVID patients can receive treatment. They’re staffed by a growing group of multidisciplinary doctors and medical researchers seeking to understand this prolonged condition. The long COVID advocacy network Survivor Corps has compiled this database of PCCCs by state; 17 out of 50 states don’t yet have any such centers. (H/t Chelsea Cirruzzo, who has a great Twitter thread covering the recent House Energy & Commerce health committee hearing on long COVID.)
    • Excess deaths in the U.S. (Kieran Healy): Kieran Healy, sociology professor at Duke University, recently updated his chart gallery on excess deaths in the U.S. during 2020, using CDC data. All states saw significantly higher death rates in 2020 compared to 2015-2019 (except for North Carolina, which has incomplete data due to reporting delays). New York City has the highest death rate by far at over 30%.

    All featured sources

  • Featured sources, April 25

    • NYT Prisons and Jails COVID-19 counts: This week, the New York Times published data from the newsroom’s effort tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths in U.S. prisons and jails. The data include both inmates and correctional officers, covering over 2,800 facilities. You can read more about the dataset in this Twitter thread.
    • RTI COVID-19 Data Insights Tool: This new data tool from RTI International provides county-level COVID-19 insights. The tool uses publicly available case data from Johns Hopkins and other sources to estimate infection risk, share of the population with some degree of immunity, and other metrics. You need to provide a name and email in order to access the tool.

    All featured sources
  • National numbers, April 25

    National numbers, April 25

    In the past week (April 17 through 23), the U.S. reported about 438,000 new cases, according to the CDC. This amounts to:

    • An average of 63,000 new cases each day
    • 133 total new cases for every 100,000 Americans
    • 1 in 749 Americans getting diagnosed with COVID-19 in the past week
    • 10% fewer new cases than last week (April 10-16)
    Nationwide COVID-19 metrics as of April 16, sourcing data from the CDC and HHS. Posted on Twitter by Conor Kelly.

    Last week, America also saw:

    • 39,400 new COVID-19 patients admitted to hospitals (12 for every 100,000 people)
    • 4,800 new COVID-19 deaths (1.5 for every 100,000 people)
    • 44.7% of new cases in the country now B.1.1.7-caused (as of March 27)
    • An average of 2.9 million vaccinations per day (per Bloomberg)

    After several weeks of rising cases, the federal numbers dropped this week by about 10%. Michigan’s case rates fell below 500 new cases per 100,000 people and its positivity rate is trending downward, leading public health experts to hope that this state’s worrying outbreak may have peaked.

    As always, though, we can’t get too excited about a single-week trend—and 60,000 new cases each day is still a concerning level at which to plateau. Over 5,000 Americans are being admitted to hospitals with COVID-19 each day, and more of these patients are now younger as this age group is the last to become eligible for vaccination. COVID-19 is becoming more of a “young person’s disease,” as Sarah Zhang wrote in The Atlantic last week.

    Variants are still a concern, too—but I have no updates on variant numbers because the CDC has not updated its Variant Proportions data since our last issue. According to revised figures (still as of March 27), B.1.1.7 is causing about 45% of cases in the U.S., and the California (B.1.427/B.1.429) and New York City (B.1.526) variants are causing about 10% of cases each. Good news on the NYC variant, though: recent studies have suggested that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines will effectively protect New Yorkers against this variant, per the New York Times.

    While the U.S. met President Biden’s 200 million dose goal last week, the pace of vaccinations is now slowing. We’re seeing about 2.9 million doses administered each day, compared to over 3 million a week ago. While this may be due in part to the Johnson & Johnson pause (more on that later), a bigger culprit is likely that vaccine supply is starting to eclipse demand. In other words, everyone who was desperate to get vaccinated has now gotten their shot, leaving those who are less confident or may have a harder time accessing an appointment. A new Kaiser Family Foundation report suggests that the U.S. is now vaccinating people in the “wait and see” group, and likely will have reached everyone in that group within a couple more weeks.

    It’s heartening to see case numbers drop, but we aren’t out of the woods yet. It will take coordinated communication and lifting of access barriers to reach a “vaccinated summer” here in the U.S… to say nothing of the rest of the world.

    more national numbers

  • Featured sources, April 18

    • Two important CDC MMWRs: This week, the CDC published Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports on racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 hospitalizations and emergency department visits. The reports continue to hammer home this pandemic’s disproportionate impact on non-white Americans. In all major regions of the country, Hispanic/Latino COVID-19 patients were more likely to be hospitalized than those of other ethnicities; and in 13 states with ED visit data, Hispanic/Latino, Black, and Indigenous patients experienced the highest rates of hospital visits for the disease.
    • Searching for COVID-19: This interactive series of data visualizations allows users to explore top COVID-19-related Google search queries since January 20, 2020. The charts focus on “How to __” and “What is/are __” questions, such as, “how to make hand sanitizer?” You can also sort by country and U.S. state. The project is a collaboration between research and design firm Schema Design, Google News, and Axios.
    • CDD vaccination data annotations: This is your friendly reminder that we maintain a set of annotations on U.S. national and state COVID-19 vaccination data sources, updated weekly on Saturdays. Montana and Wyoming continue to be our last two holdout states not yet reporting demographic data for their vaccinated residents.

    All featured sources

  • Featured sources, April 11

    • Lost on the frontline: This database from Kaiser Health News and The Guardian honors American healthcare workers who died during the COVID-19 pandemic. We featured this source when it was launched back in August 2020. At that time, 167 workers were included in the interactive database; now, you can read the profiles of hundreds more. 3,607 deaths have been recorded in total. KHN and The Guardian closed their joint investigation this week, and public health leaders and policymakers are now calling on the federal government to continue this crucial work.
    • State COVID-19 Hospitalization Data Annotations, by the COVID Tracking Project: This week, the COVID Tracking Project released a snapshot of extensive research into how U.S. states are reporting their currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The research has informed comparisons between Project data and federal data which demonstrated the quality of the HHS hospitalization dataset. You can access these annotations, along with information on cases, tests, and deaths, at the Project’s Data Annotations page.
    • Food Insecurity in the United States: Nonprofit hunger relief organization Feeding America has compiled and mapped data showing how the pandemic has impacted food insecurity in the U.S. You can search for a specific state, county, or local food bank to see food-insecure population estimates, average meal costs, food stamp program eligibility, and more.

    All featured sources

  • Featured sources, April 4

    • Vaccination data update: Two more states are now reporting vaccinations by race/ethnicity. New Hampshire has reported the figures in one of the state’s recent daily updates, which include vaccination data on a weekly basis. And South Dakota has added race/ethnicity to the vaccines tab of its dashboard. As always, you can find detailed annotations on state and national vaccine data sources (updated yesterday) on the COVID Data Dispatch website.
    • KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: The Kaiser Family Foundation released the latest update for their Vaccine Monitor, an ongoing survey project to track public attitudes and experiences with COVID-19 vaccines. In this update, published this past Tuesday, KFF reports that 62% of those surveyed say they’ve already gotten a shot or plan to do so as soon as possible, while 17% want to “wait and see” how the rollout goes. That “wait and see” share is down from previous reports.
    • CDC Provisional Mortality Data for 2020: This past Wednesday, the CDC released death counts for 2020. As we’ve discussed before, mortality data tend to be reported with a lag compared to other types of public health numbers due to the complex processes involved with tallying up death certificates. About 3.3 million deaths occurred overall in 2020, according to these new data; this was a 16% increase from 2019. COVID was the third leading cause of death that year, accounting for 345,000 lives lost.
    • Federal COVID-19 Chart Gallery: Peter Walker, former data visualization co-lead for the COVID Tracking Project, has put together a new Tableau gallery using data from the CDC COVID Tracker and HHS Protect. The gallery includes many chart formats that CTP fans may recognize, such as national views, four-pane views, and regional comparisons. More charts are coming!
    • Pfizer COVID-19 Clinical Trials: An interactive, searchable map from Pfizer lets you look up vaccine trials around the world. For each trial, you can see the location, the trial’s phase, who’s eligible to join, and a link out to more information on ClinicalTrials.gov. Trials are happening in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, and Japan.
    • mRNA sequence for the Moderna vaccine: A group of scientists at Stanford used small amounts of Moderna vaccine left after all doses were extracted from vials to sequence the mRNA in that vaccine, then posted the sequence publicly on GitHub. The full sequence takes up two pages. You can read more about the scientists’ work and their decision to post the sequence in Motherboard.
    • Pulse of the Purchaser 2021 Report: This new report from the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions examines how employer attitudes to healthcare have shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report presents results from a survey of 151 major employers, representing diverse industries and sizes; it includes attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines, telehealth, equity, and other healthcare topics.

    All featured sources
  • National numbers, April 4

    National numbers, April 4

    In the past week (March 27 through April 2), the U.S. reported about 435,000 new cases, according to the CDC. This amounts to:

    • An average of 62,000 new cases each day
    • 133 total new cases for every 100,000 Americans
    • 1 in 754 Americans getting diagnosed with COVID-19 in the past week
    • 9% more new cases than last week (March 20-26)
    Nationwide COVID-19 metrics as of April 2, sourcing data from the CDC and HHS. Posted on Twitter by Conor Kelly.

    Last week, America also saw:

    • 34,600 new COVID-19 patients admitted to hospitals (10.6 for every 100,000 people)
    • 6,200 new COVID-19 deaths (1.9 for every 100,000 people)
    • An average of 3 million vaccinations per day (per Bloomberg)

    “I’m gonna pause here, I’m gonna lose the script, and I’m gonna reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.”

    You’ve probably seen headlines with this quotation, something CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at the White House COVID-19 briefing on Monday before launching into an impassioned plea to “just hold on a little while longer.” Still, I recommend watching the full video, if you haven’t yet. I watched it live, and was struck by Dr. Walensky’s drive to avoid any more people sent to the hospital with COVID-19, any more unnecessary deaths.

    The pandemic’s current state puts public health leaders like Dr. Walensky in a challenging position. New cases continue to rise, with states like Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and other parts of the northeast seeing more concerning spikes. While a 60,000-cases-per-day average may seem small compared to the numbers we saw this winter, it’s comparable to the summer surge that devastated much of the country. And our still-improving genomic surveillance system is finding more and more cases caused by variants.

    Yet at the same time, millions of people are getting vaccinated—a new record was set just yesterday, with 4 million doses reported in one day. The weekly average is now at 3 million new doses each day. Not four days after that briefing when Dr. Walensky warned of impending doom, the CDC put out a travel guidance that many took as a license to book post-vaccination plane tickets. (It’s not, though by the way some have described it, you could be forgiven for thinking that way.)

    Those who’ve been vaccinated may find it hard to believe another surge is coming. But we can’t let down our guard yet! About three in ten Americans have received at least one vaccine dose—that’s far from herd immunity.

    more national numbers

  • Featured sources, March 28

    • COVID-19 diverse sources: NPR journalists from the organization’s Source of the Week project have compiled this database of COVID-19 experts from diverse backgrounds. The database is divided into 13 major categories, including virology, disease origin, health policy, racial/ethnic health disparities, and more. I know I’ll be using this database in my own reporting!
    • School Survey Dashboard from the Institute of Education Statistics: As part of the Biden Administration’s commitment to reopening K-12 schools across the country, the federal government is now collecting data on how students are receiving education—and releasing those data on a monthly basis. This dashboard draws from surveys of a nationally represented sample including 7,000 rural, suburban, and urban schools, focusing on fourth-graders and eighth-graders. We don’t have data on COVID-19 cases, tests, or enrollment numbers, and several major states are missing, but this is a good start! For more on these data, read Lauren Camera in U.S. News.
    • Counties with High COVID-19 Incidence and Relatively Large Racial and Ethnic Minority Populations (CDC MMWR): The CDC continues adding to the overwhelming body of evidence pointing to disproportionately high COVID-19 impacts for people of color in the U.S. This report, released last Wednesday, identified counties across the U.S. that had both large minority populations and high COVID-19 case counts (relative to their populations) between April and December 2020. Different racial/ethnic groups have had different trajectories, but by mid-December, almost all counties in the U.S. had high case numbers thanks to the overwhelming winter surge.
    • PreventCOVIDU study examines vaccine effectiveness in college students: At the White House COVID-19 briefing this Friday, Dr. Fauci described a new clinical trial that kicked off this past week. 12,000 college students, age 18-26, at 22 universities across the country, will be followed over the 5 months. Half of the students are receiving Moderna vaccine doses now, while the other half will serve as a control group (and get vaccinated later). All students will get tested daily—and, in a unique move for vaccine studies, about 25,000 of these students’ close contacts will also get tested daily. The study is designed to determine if the Moderna vaccine prevents coronavirus infection and transmission. See the list of participating universities at the link.

    All featured sources