COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: CDC

  • K-12 school updates, March 21

    Four items from this week, in the real of COVID-19 and schools:

    • New funding for school testing: As part of the Biden administration’s massive round of funding for school reopenings, $10 billion is specifically devoted to “COVID-19 screening testing for K-12 teachers, staff, and students in schools.” The Department of Education press release does not specify how schools will be required to report the results of these federally-funded tests, if at all. The data gap continues. (This page does list fund allocations for each state, though.)
    • New paper (and database) on disparities due to school closures: This paper in Nature Human Behavior caught my attention this week. Two researchers from the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy used anonymized cell phone data to compile a database tracking attendance changes at over 100,000 U.S. schools during the pandemic. Their results: school closures are more common in schools where more students have lower math scores, are students of color, have experienced homelessness, or are eligible for free/reduced-price lunches. The data are publicly available here.
    • New CDC guidance on schools: This past Friday, the CDC updated its guidance on operating schools during COVID-19 to half its previous physical distance requirement: instead of learning from six feet apart, students may now take it to only three feet. This change will allow for some schools to increase their capacity, bringing more students back into the classroom at once. The guidance is said to be based on updated research, though some critics have questioned why the scientific guidance appears to follow a political priority.
    • New round of (Twitter) controversy: This week, The Atlantic published an article by economist Emily Oster with the headline, “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.” The piece quickly drew criticism from epidemiologists and other COVID-19 commentators, pointing out that the story has an ill-formed headline and pullquote, at best—and makes dangerously misleading comparisons, at worst. Here’s a thread that details major issues with the piece and another thread specifically on distortion of data. There is still a lot we don’t know about how COVID-19 impacts children, and the continued lack of K-12 schools data isn’t helping; as a result, I’m wary of supporting any broad conclusion like Oster’s, much as I may want to go visit my young cousins this summer.

    more K-12 schools content

  • Featured sources and federal data updates, Feb. 28

    We’re sneaking a few more federal updates into the source section this week.

    • CDC changed their methodology for state vaccination counts: Last Saturday, February 20, the CDC made two major changes to how it reports vaccination data. First, instead of simply reporting doses administered by federal agencies (the Department of Defense, Indian Health Services, etc.) as fully separate counts, the agency started reporting these doses in the states where they were administered. Second, the CDC started reporting vaccinations in the state where someone is counted as a resident, rather than where they received the shot. Both of these changes make state-reported counts and CDC-reported counts less directly comparable, since states typically don’t track federal agency doses and count doses based on where they were administered. You can read more about these changes on Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker methodology and analysis blog; Bloomberg is now using CDC data only to update its U.S. data.
    • VaccineFinder is open for COVID-19 vaccines: As of Wednesday, Americans can use this national tool to find COVID-19 vaccine appointments. Just put in your ZIP code and select a radius (1 mile, 10 miles, 50 miles, etc.), and the tool will show you providers nearby. For each provider, the tool provides contact information—and, crucially, whether this location actually has vaccines in stock. Unlike many other federal dashboards, VaccineFinder isn’t a new tool; it was developed during the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009. STAT’s Katie Palmer provides more history and context on the site here.
    • Government Accountability Office may push for more data centralization: The Government Accountability Office (or GAO), a watchdog agency that does auditing and evaluations for Congress, has been investigating the federal government’s COVID-19 data collection—and is finding this collection “inconsistent and confusing,” according to a report by POLITICO’s Erin Banco. While the GAO’s report won’t be finalized and made public until March, the agency is expected to recommend that data should be more standardized. It could call for the CDC to make changes to its data collection on cases, deaths, and vaccines similar to how the HHS revamped collection for testing and hospitalization data in summer 2020. CDC officials are wary of these potential changes; it’ll definitely be a big data story to follow this spring.
    • Global.health is ready for research: Back in January, I wrote about Global.health, a data science initiative aiming to bring anonymized case data to researchers on a global scale. The initiative’s COVID-19 dataset is now online, including over 10 million individual case records from dozens of countries. 10 million case records! Including demographic and outcomes data! If you’d like to better understand why this dataset is a pretty big deal, read this article in Nature or this one in STAT. I plan on digging into the dataset next week, and may devote more space to it in a future issue.
    • NIH COVID-19 treatment guidelines: In one of the White House COVID-19 press briefings this week, Dr. Fauci referenced this National Institutes of Health (NIH) website intended to provide both physicians and researchers with the latest guidance on how to treat COVID-19 patients. The website acts as a living medical document, featuring an interactive table of contents and a text search tool. Follow @NIHCOVIDTxGuide on Twitter for updates.
    • Burbio’s K-12 School Opening Tracker: Burbio, a digital platform for community events, is actively monitoring over 1,200 school districts to determine which schools are currently using virtual, in-person, and hybrid models. The sample size includes the 200 largest districts in the U.S. and other districts with a mix of sizes and geographies, in order to reflect local decision-making across the U.S. See more methodology details here.
    • COVID-19’s impact on LGBTQ+ communities: The Journalist’s Resource at Harvard Kennedy School has compiled a list of recent research on how the coronavirus pandemic impacted LGBTQ+ Americans. In many cases, the pandemic furthered disproportionate poverty and poor health outcomes in this community; they shouldn’t be ignored in COVID-19 coverage.
    • The Accountability Project: A repository of public data run by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Accountability Project reached 1 billion records last week. The Project includes several COVID-19-related datasets, including a dataset of Paycheck Protection Program loans and data on hospitals and nursing homes.

    All featured sources
  • National numbers, Feb. 21

    National numbers, Feb. 21

    In the past week (February 14 through 20), the U.S. reported about 464,000 new cases, according to the COVID Tracking Project. This amounts to:

    • An average of 66,000 new cases each day
    • 141 total new cases for every 100,000 Americans
    • 1 in 708 Americans getting diagnosed with COVID-19 in the past week
    • About two-fifths of the new cases reported in the week of January 23
    Nationwide COVID-19 metrics published in the COVID Tracking Project’s daily update on February 20. Hospitalizations are now dropping below the spring and summer peaks.

    Last week, America also saw:

    • 58,200 people now hospitalized with COVID-19 (18 for every 100,000 people)
    • 13,300 new COVID-19 deaths (4.1 for every 100,000 people)
    • An average of 1.49 million vaccinations per day (per Bloomberg)

    The number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals is now the lowest it’s been since early November. About 7,000 new patients were admitted each day this week—while this is still a huge number, it’s a notable drop from the peak (18,000 per day) we saw earlier in the winter.

    I got those new hospital admission numbers from the COVID Data Tracker Weekly Review, a new report that the CDC recently started publishing in conjunction with its COVID-19 dashboard. It’s kind-of like a longer, more numbers-heavy, less snarky version of this newsletter segment.

    The Weekly Review this past Friday also highlighted the progression of coronavirus variants in the U.S. We’ve now detected over 1,500 cases of B.1.1.7 (the variant originating in the U.K.), as well as 21 cases of B.1.351 (originated in South Africa) and 5 cases of P.1 (originated in Brazil). While sequencing efforts have increased significantly in the past few weeks, these numbers are likely still massive undercounts. The CDC encourages Americans to “stop variants by stopping the spread.” In other words, all the behaviors we’ve been using to keep ourselves and our communities safe from spreading the virus will also help reduce its opportunities to mutate.

    One more piece of good news from this week’s COVID-19 data: vaccinations may already be having an impact in nursing homes and other long-term facilities. The share of deaths occurring in these facilities dropped under 20% this week, for the first time since the COVID Tracking Project started collecting these data.

    https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/1362909841719631878

    The pace of vaccinations was slowed this week thanks to winter storms across the South and Midwest. But this news from LTC facilities is a hopeful note of how elderly Americans may be more protected in the weeks to come.

    more national numbers
  • Next in vaccination data demands: More hyperlocal data

    Next in vaccination data demands: More hyperlocal data

    Demographic data released by the CDC; figures as of Feb. 14.

    The CDC continues to improve its vaccination reporting. The agency is now regularly reporting demographic data on its dashboard—including race, ethnicity, age, and sex. You can see counts for both U.S. residents who have received one and two doses. Like the rest of the CDC’s dashboard, the agency is updating these figures every day.

    Advocates for greater equity in the vaccine rollout have pushed for such a data release for weeks. Meanwhile, more states than ever before are publishing their own demographic data: as of yesterday, we’re up to 33 states reporting race and/or ethnicity of vaccinated residents, 36 reporting age, and 32 reporting sex/gender.

    But when it comes to tracking who’s getting vaccinated in America, we still have a long way to go. Now that demographic data are becoming more available at the federal and state levels, equity advocates are pushing for more local data—vaccinations by county, by town, by ZIP code.

    New York City data reporter Ann Choi, for example, pointed out on Friday that this city has lagged behind cities such as Chicago and D.C. in releasing ZIP code-level vaccination data, which would allow researchers and journalists to see precisely which neighborhoods are getting more shots. And NYC ZIP codes are precise—I’m literally moving two blocks, but my ZIP code is changing.

    (P.S. Ann will be speaking at the third workshop in the Diving into COVID-19 data series, on March 3, about her work at THE CITY!)

    The Biden administration will soon start sending doses directly to Community Vaccination Centers, sites operated in partnership with existing community health clinics in an attempt to capitalize on existing connections that these clinics have in their neighborhoods. In order to judge the success of these clinics, we need data about their communities. Local data, demographic data, occupation data… the more complete picture that we can get, the better.

    With more local data, we can do more stories like these:

    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.
  • New schools guidance fails to call for data reporting

    New schools guidance fails to call for data reporting

    This past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a long-awaited guidance on school reopening.

    While the CDC isn’t able to actually regulate what schools do, many state and local leaders look to the agency for advice on how to best follow the available scientific evidence. And, if you’ve been following the reopening debate, you know that there are a lot of differing opinions on how to best follow the available scientific evidence. Pro-opening advocates hoped to see the CDC strongly insist that schools go in-person, perhaps with limited cleaning and allowing less than six feet of distancing. Pro-closure advocates hoped to see the agency insist that teachers needed to be vaccinated before they could go back to their classrooms.

    Rather than strictly advocating for either closed or open classrooms, however, the guidance takes a moderate route. It emphasizes three strategies already familiar to school leaders: layering different COVID-19 protection methods (masks, distancing, ventilation, and so on); looking at COVID-19 cases in the surrounding community to determine whether it’s safe for you to open; and having multiple opening “phases” available depending on community safety. Frequent testing and vaccinations of school staff are included as “additional” options, which the CDC suggests schools should employ if they have the resources.

    New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, who has covered the epidemiological questions around reopening, wrote a Twitter thread that further explains why this is a moderate route:

    https://twitter.com/apoorva_nyc/status/1360641557586714625

    My big question of this guidance, though, was: what does this mean for data? As we’ve written in the CDD before, the Biden administration has the opportunity to correct a longstanding failure of its predecessor. Under Biden, national public health leadership could require that all public schools report their case counts, testing numbers, and enrollment numbers to the federal government—and publish these figures in a systematic way. But the new CDC guidance largely retains the status quo for school COVID-19 data.

    “Every COVID-19 testing site is required to report to the appropriate state or local health officials all diagnostic and screening tests performed,” the guidance says. This requirement has been in place since last spring. Similarly, the CDC says that school administrators should notify parents, teachers, and staff when cases are reported—again, such internal reporting systems are already in place.

    But there’s no mention of making these data public. The CDC is not promising a national school data dashboard, or even requiring state and local public health departments to put their data up on a portal with the rest of their COVID-19 figures.

    You’d think that state and local agencies wouldn’t need such a push, over a year into the pandemic. But, as we’ve reported in the CDD before, the vast majority of states currently fail to publish K-12 COVID-19 data in a way that makes it possible to actually track transmission rates in schools.

    While 34 states and D.C. regularly report counts of COVID-19 cases that have occurred in schools, 16 states report incomplete data—or no data at all. And for the states that do report case counts, most don’t report enrollment numbers, making it difficult to discern whether the virus is impacting a single family or running rampant in a school. (Four cases in a school with 4,000 kids in classrooms, for example, is vastly different from four cases in a school with 100 kids in classrooms.)

    New York continues to be the model state for K-12 data, as it’s one of only four to report enrollment numbers and the only state to report school-specific testing numbers. As the CDC seems to consider systematic school testing “optional,” it seems likely that this will continue.

    We can see that most counties in the U.S. have high enough community transmission rates—or, COVID-19 cases in the general public—that the CDC’s new guidance would categorize them as being in the “red zone,” a.k.a. too dangerous for schools to be open. But without case numbers for schools themselves, reported in a standard way, it’s hard to know whether the CDC’s assessment is accurate.

    School data continues to be a massive gap in America’s pandemic tracking. Readers, I urge you to see what data are available for your state, county, and district—and push your local officials to be more transparent. 

    Dashboard by Benjy Renton.

    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.
  • The federal government starts acting like a federal government

    The federal government starts acting like a federal government

    A slide from the January 27 White House COVID-19 briefing, featuring the Biden team’s new commitment to provide states with three weeks’ lead time into their vaccine supply.

    Good afternoon only to the reporters on last Wednesday’s White House COVID-19 press call who told Dr. Anthony Fauci that he was on mute.

    And yes, you read that right: the White House is doing regular COVID-19 press calls again! With Dr. Fauci! Who is now President Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor on COVID-19! And CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky! And chair of Biden’s health equity task force Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith!

    Okay, that’s enough exclamation points. The briefings, which will be held three times a week, provide data-driven updates on the state of the pandemic and allow journalists to ask hard questions of the Biden administration’s response. In addition to the scientific experts, briefings so far have featured White House advisors/COVID-19 coordinators Jeff Zients and Andy Slavitt, who can speak to the more logistical aspects of the administration’s actions.

    This is, essentially, what a responsible federal government should have been doing since January 2020. But after a year of the Trump administration’s confusion, lack of coordination, and outright lies, it’s refreshing to watch a White House COVID-19 briefing in which every statement doesn’t need to be rigorously fact-checked in real-time.

    Besides the press briefings, here are a couple of moves the Biden team made this week that underscore the new administration’s commitment to better (and more transparent) COVID-19 data:

    • Publicly releasing the COVID-19 State Profile Reports: Since last spring, the White House COVID-19 Task Force has regularly compiled detailed reports to help national and state leaders respond to the pandemic. The reports include COVID-19 data for states, counties, and cities, along with specific assessments on where governors and state public health officials should focus their efforts in order to control the virus’ spread. In late December, the data behind these reports were released to the public; here’s a CDD post with more info on that release. Biden’s COVID-19 Task Force has kept the data releases going, and this week, they also shared the PDF reports themselves. What’s more, new White House COVID-19 Data Director Cyrus Shahpar made this release his first Tweet on his new official account—and he thanked public advocates for these data, such as the Center for Public Integrity’s Liz Essley Whyte and COVID Exit Strategy’s Ryan Panchadsaram. The release indicates a new commitment to data transparency that we did not see from Trump’s White House for the majority of his tenure.
    • Updating the CDC’s COVID-19 dashboard: The CDC has been building out a COVID-19 tracker since the spring, featuring data on cases, testing, vulnerable populations, and (since December) vaccination. But it got a major upgrade this week: the dashboard now has a curated landing page and a sidebar menu that makes it much easier for users to see all the available data. This dashboard also now includes those State Profile Reports I mentioned above, making it easy for users to find information about their regions. And, under the “Your Community” label, you’ll also find an interactive COVID-19 vulnerability index: select your county, and the map will show you how susceptible you are to the pandemic based on your community’s current infection rate, testing, population demographics, health disparities, and more.
    • More lead time for vaccine distribution: Last week, I discussed how unpredictable vaccine shipments from the federal government were making it difficult for states—and by extension, local public health departments and individual providers—to coordinate their dose administration. Biden’s team improved the situation this week by giving states their shipment numbers three weeks in advance. The extended lead time will allow vaccine providers to plan out appointments and coordinate other logistics in order to ensure all doses are used. Both the CDC’s Pfizer and Moderna distribution datasets were most recently updated on January 26, with allocation numbers for January 25 and February 1.
    • Stepping up the genomic surveillance: In both of this week’s White House COVID-19 briefings, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that the agency is actively looking for new SARS-CoV-2 variants by working with local and international partners. She gave some specifics in Friday’s briefing: “We are now asking for surveillance from every single state,” she said, requiring states to sequence 750 strains each week. Collaborations with both commercial labs and research universities will take the surveillance to thousands of strains per week. As Sarah Braner wrote earlier in January, such surveillance is key to understanding how prevalent the new—and more contagious—coronavirus strains are in the U.S., as well as to detecting future strains that may become a threat in the coming months.

    It looks like the CDC may be on its way to adapting its current dashboard into the Nationwide Pandemic Dashboard that Biden promised in his transition plan. But I, for one, am trying not to get too comfortable. The statements still need to be fact-checked, and the hard questions need to be asked. Biden’s team is making the bare minimum look nice—albeit with a few Zoom glitches.

    As I look forward into my coverage of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response, and its healthcare policies more broadly, I’m thinking about this quote from Chris La Tray in his most recent newsletter issue, “Same as it Ever Was”:

    “I’m already sick of all the white liberal people humping each other’s legs every time Biden does something that is simply his damn job. “It’s so nice to have a president that….” Blech. Puke. There is copious lingering accountability to be addressed and Joe goddamn Biden is neck deep in it. We are not going back to anything that resembles the last 40 years of his political career, our only way is forward.”

    Our only way is forward. To end this pandemic, to prepare for the next one.

    Related posts

    • 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.

    • Vaccination data update, Jan. 3

      Despite the holidays, several more states began reporting vaccination data in the past week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also made a huge update: this national dashboard is now posting vaccination counts at the state level.

      Here are the notable updates:

      • I launched a vaccination data page on the CDD site which includes annotations on ten major national sources and every state’s vaccination reporting. I’ll be updating it weekly—the most recent update was yesterday.
      • Five states have started regularly reporting vaccination data since December 27: Alabama, Alaska, Indiana, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. 32 total states are now reporting these data; 15 states are reporting race and ethnicity of vaccinated residents. See more details on the resource page.
      • On December 30, the CDC started reporting state-level vaccination data on its national COVID-19 dashboard. For every state, the CDC is reporting total vaccine doses distributed and total people who have received their first dose. The dashboard also includes national counts—both for the U.S. as a whole and for long-term care facilities. Data are not yet available for download. According to the most recent update (yesterday, January 2), 4.2 million Americans have received their first dose.
      • Drew Armstrong, the Bloomberg reporter who runs the publication’s vaccination dashboard, posted a vaccine data user guide on Twitter. While the Tweet thread primarily describes the methodology and design choices behind Bloomberg’s dashboard, it also provides useful context for vaccination data overall. Two notable details: all vaccination data lag (the CDC’s data lag by about 50 hours, according to Armstrong), and Bloomberg is working on making the underlying data behind their dashboard public.
      • Benjy Renton halted updates for the “Doses Administered” tracker on his Vaccine Allocation Dashboard. As the CDC is now providing standardized state counts—and Renton is a one-person tracking operation—he’s switching to focus on analyzing vaccination trends and accessibility.  
      • Distribution delays: Operation Warp Speed promised that, if the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines received Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, 20 million Americans would get vaccine doses by the end of 2020. That clearly didn’t happen. What went wrong? To answer that question, I recommend two articles: this STAT News story and this CNN story. Both articles suggest that a lag in data reporting may be one reason why the current vaccination counts look so low. Still, there’s a big difference between 4.2 million and 20 million.
      • Vaccination and the new COVID-19 strain: As the B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant, identified in the U.K., becomes an increasingly ominous threat to America’s COVID-19 containment, vaccination becomes increasingly urgent. Zeynep Tufekci’s latest piece in The Atlantic explains the issue. One piece that stuck out to me: the U.S. doesn’t have good genomic surveillance—or, a system to systematically sequence the virus genomes for people infected with SARS-CoV-2—which makes us less equipped to see where the new strain is actually spreading. As Tufekci puts it: “we are flying without a map.”
      • One dose or two? Scientists and public health leaders have been debating changing our vaccination protocol. Should the U.S. stick to the script, so to speak, and reserve enough vaccine doses that everyone who receives one dose can receive a second in the prescribed time window? Or should we give as many people first doses as we can, accepting that some may not get a second dose for months—or at all? (The U.K. opted for the latter earlier this week.) University of Washington professor Carl Bergstrom has compiled some Twitter threads that explain the debate. Dr. Fauci said on Friday that the U.S. will stick to the official two-dose regimen, but the scientific discourse will likely continue.

      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.

    • Federal data updates, Dec. 13

      Rounding out the week with a couple of updates on federal data, unrelated to hospitalizations and vaccines.

      • New app for testing data: The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) have developed an app called SimpleReport, which allows COVID-19 test providers to quickly report data to their local public health departments. An assisted living center in Tucson, Arizona was the first to pilot the app this week. The center’s Community Director said this app helped her quickly file data that would otherwise need to be entered in three different places.
      • CMS proposes that providers build standard databases: This past Thursday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new rule to streamline data sharing between the agency and individual healthcare providers. Under this rule, providers would need to build application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are essentially data-sharing systems that provide a standardized format for information. Such standardization, CMS claims, would make it easier for patients to get medical treatments and prescriptions authorized by Medicaid.
      • Bill to make federal court filings free passes the House: PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is an antiquated federal database of court filings which journalists and other researchers must pay to use. It costs 10 cents a page to access court dockets and other documents through PACER—and since court documents can get long, that cost adds up. The Open Courts Act, a bill which would make PACER free to the public, passed in the House of Representatives this past week. It now heads to the Senate. This bill may not be directly COVID-related right now, but I anticipate that journalists will be covering COVID-19 lawsuits for years after the pandemic ends.
      more federal data news

    • COVID source shout-out: The CDC

      This past Thursday, the CDC held a media briefing. Normally, this wouldn’t be big news; the agency is expected to alert the press—and by extension, the American public—of major new developments in its work. During the pandemic, however, the very existence of these briefings has become newsworthy.

      The CDC held COVID-19 briefings regularly throughout January, February, and March, then stopped abruptly at the height of the spring outbreak in the Northeast. The next briefing after that was in June, and they’ve been sporadic since. Before Thursday’s call, the previous two briefings were held in late October and mid-August.

      Thursday’s press call highlighted the release of a new CDC guidance, which encourages Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving and provides safety suggestions for those who feel they must travel. Reporters on the call (fairly) questioned why the CDC put out this new guidance now, only a week before the holiday, when many Americans have already made plans. Public health experts, science communicators, and others (including this newsletter) have been calling for reduced Thanksgiving travel for several weeks now.

      Still, the guidance and associated press call indicate that the CDC wants to step up as the nation’s outbreak worsens. Whether the agency can regain public trust remains to be seen.