- CDC updates its variant classifications: This one is more of an update than a new source. On Thursday, the CDC updated the list of coronavirus variants that the agency’s scientists are watching. This list now includes three categories: Variants of Concern (or VOCs, which pose a significant threat to the U.S.), Variants of Interest (which may be concerning, but aren’t yet enough of a threat to be VOCs), and Variants Being Monitored (which were previously concerning, but now are circulating at very low levels in the U.S.). Notably, Delta is now the CDC’s only VOC; all other variants are Variants Being Monitored.
- COVID-19 School Data Hub: Emily Oster, one of the leading (and most controversial) researchers on COVID-19 cases in K-12 schools, has a new schools dashboard. The dashboard currently provides data from the 2020-2021 school year, including schools’ learning modes (in-person, hybrid, virtual) and case counts. Of course, data are only available for about half of states. You can read more about the dashboard in this Substack post from Oster.
- Influenza Encyclopedia, 1918-1919: In today’s National Numbers section, I noted that the U.S. has now reported more deaths from COVID-19 than it did from the Spanish flu. If you’d like to dig more into that past pandemic, you can find statistics, historical documents, photographs, and more from 50 U.S. cities at this online encyclopedia, produced by the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine.
Tag: Featured sources
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Featured sources, September 26
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Featured sources, September 19
- COVID Behaviors Dashboard from Johns Hopkins: John Hopkins University maintains one of the oldest and best-known COVID-19 dashboards of the pandemic. The team recently expanded its data offerings with a new dashboard focused on pandemic attitudes and practices around the world. This dashboard draws from surveys conducted in over 100 countries, in collaboration with the WHO; read more about it here.
- COVID-19 K-12 School Testing Impact Estimator: What COVID-19 testing strategy would make the most sense for your local K-12 school? This dashboard, by the Rockefeller Foundation and Mathematica (the data research organization), is designed to help stakeholders find out. Simply plug in the school’s characteristics and COVID-19 safety goals, and the dashboard will tell you how different testing strategies may measure up.
- Vaccine hesitancy roundup from the Journalist’s Resource: This resource page includes a wealth of data and insights on vaccine hesitancy in the U.S., drawing from a variety of surveys and research papers on the topic. As of early September, author Naseem Miller writes, the PubMed research database included over 750 studies on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, signifying growing academic interest in this topic.
- Hospital challenges to public health reporting: A new report from the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology explores the challenges that non-government hospitals have faced in electronically exchanging information with public health agencies. One major finding: in both 2018 and 2019, half of all hospitals lacked the capacity for this data exchange. No wonder electronic reporting has been such a challenge during the pandemic.
- NIH Long COVID initiative revs up: This isn’t an actual data source, more of an update: the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s RECOVER Initiative to study Long COVID awarded a major research grant this week. About $470 million goes to New York University’s Langone Medical Center, which will serve as a national hub for Long COVID research and award sub-grants to other institutions. The NIH’s RECOVER website currently reports that between 10% and 30% of people infected with the coronavirus will go on to develop Long COVID; hopefully research at NYU and elsewhere will lead to some more precise numbers.
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Featured sources, September 12
- K-12 Education Polls: Staff at EdChoice, a nonprofit education research organization, are keeping track of polling on school reopening and various related safety strategies, such as vaccine and mask requirements. This spreadsheet includes over 300 polls going back to March 2020.
- The Overlooked, K-12 report: Here’s another K-12 reopening source: a new report from the education-focused Walton Family Foundation characterizing families who felt dissatisfied by their education choices in fall 2020. The report includes estimates of students who changed schools, failed to enroll in formal schooling, or otherwise “are frustrated with their current schooling option and lack access to their preferred alternative(s).”
- Case and death underreporting in nursing homes: In a new paper published this week, researchers from Harvard University estimated that over 68,000 COVID-19 cases and over 16,000 deaths among U.S. nursing home residents have gone unreported in federal data. The researchers made their facility-level underreporting estimates available on GitHub, including nursing homes in 20 states that were utilized for the analysis.
- Case acceleration by state: In July, STAT News data project manager J. Emory Parker introduced a new metric for visualizing the pandemic: case acceleration, or how fast cases are increasing (or decreasing). Now, you can view state-by-state case acceleration numbers in real-time on STAT’s website. The dashboard is updated daily with data from the CDC, Johns Hopkins, and Our World in Data.
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Sources and updates, September 5
This week, we have a couple of source updates and a couple of additional data news items.
- Pediatric data from the CDC: In a rather timely update, the CDC has added a pediatric data tab to its COVID Data Tracker dashboard. The new page links to all the data on COVID-19 and kids that the agency has available: including multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), demographic data for vaccinations and hospitalizations, and COVID-19 outcomes during pregnancy.
- Additional vaccine doses (also CDC): The CDC recently added an important new field to the vaccination page of its dashboard: people who received an additional vaccine dose. This includes about 1.3 million people as of September 4. The count started on August 13, when the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee endorsed additional shots for immunocompromised Americans—though the CDC’s dashboard doesn’t distinguish between those additional dose recipients who are and are not immunocompromised, according to their “about the data” page.
- More states pull back on COVID-19 reporting: Here at the CDD, we love to call out states that stop reporting key COVID-19 data points or make that reporting less frequent. A new article from KHN’s Andy Miller speaks to this trend, which has continued in recent weeks despite the Delta surge. The article specifically calls out government websites in Georgia, which stopped updating public data on COVID-19 in prisons and long-term care facilities “just as the dangerous Delta variant was taking hold,” Miller reports.
- New study provides rigorous evidence that masks work: On Wednesday, authors of a randomized control trial study—the gold standard of scientific research—shared their findings in a preprint. The study investigated mask use by providing different levels of free mask supplies and promotion to different villages in Bangladesh. Villages that received the masks and learned about their use had fewer COVID-19 cases, with the villages that received surgical masks (as opposed to cloth masks) seeing the biggest impact. This study is a pretty big deal, with one commenter calling it “arguably the most important single piece of epidemiological research of the entire pandemic.” For more context, see this Washington Post article.
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Featured sources, August 29
I was on vacation last week, unable to scour the internet for COVID-19 sources like I usually do. So, here are a couple of old favorites from the archives:
- School Survey Dashboard from the Institute of Education Statistics (featured 3/28/21): 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 (still!) don’t have data on COVID-19 cases, tests, or enrollment numbers, however.
- Vaccine consent laws by state (featured on 5/23/21): As schools reopen, a lot of teenagers out there may want to know if they can get vaccinated without parental permission. The site VaxTeen provides these kids with information on the consent laws in every state, as well as a guide for talking to your parents about vaccines and other resources.
- COVID-19 in ICE detention centers (featured on 11/1/20): Since March 2020, researchers from the Vera Institute of Justice have been compiling data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on COVID-19 cases and testing in immigrant detention centers. The researchers note that ICE replaces previously reported numbers whenever its dataset is updated, making it difficult to track COVID-19 in these facilities over time.
- Rural hospital closures (featured on 6/20/21): The North Carolina Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina tracks hospitals in rural areas that close or otherwise stop providing in-patient care. The database includes 181 hospitals that have closed between 2005 and 2021, available in both an interactive map and a downloadable Excel file.
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Featured sources, August 22
- State Guidance on School Reopenings, CRPE: The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) is an education research organization focused on improving student outcomes. The organization has compiled and analyzed state guidance for school reopening in fall 2020, focusing on mask mandates and vaccination requirements. Read about their findings here.
- Will Students Come Back?: July 2021 Parent Survey: The RAND Corporation, a survey company, has a new report out this week displaying parent attitudes towards fall reopening. According to the survey, as of July 2021, 89% of U.S. parents are planning to send their kids back to school in person. This number is higher for white (94%) and Asian (88%) parents than Black (82%) and Hispanic (83%) parents.
- COVID Stimulus Watch: The policy resource center Good Jobs First has put together this extensive database of CARES Act funding recipients. You can search the database by federal agency, CARES Act program, business sector, company type, location, amount received, and whether the money has been refunded.
- Body Politic’s Comprehensive Guide to Covering Long COVID: Writer and long COVID advocate Fiona Lowenstein has written this guide to covering the prolonged condition. The guide includes long COVID’s history, key terms, finding experts, telling patient stories, and more. Lowenstein shares key insights from the guide in this Center for Health Journalism article.
- Update on Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker: After nine months of manual data updates, the team behind Bloomberg’s COVID-19 vaccine tracker is switching to automated data capture from the World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins, and other sources. Or, as health editor Drew Armstrong put it on Twitter: “We’re finally ready to let the robots take over.” Thank you, Bloomberg team, for your months of hard work!
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Featured sources, August 15
- CDC Variant Proportions: The CDC has adjusted the update schedule of its variant proportions estimates, from every two weeks to once a week. Variant numbers are still somewhat delayed (the most recent estimates are now from August 7, about a week ago), but this is a big improvement. The agency has also expanded its estimates to include Delta sub-lineages, called AY.1, AY.2, and AY.3.
- COVID-19 Vaccination among People with Disabilities: Another recent change to the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker is this new page, reflecting vaccination coverage among Americans with disabilities. Data come from the Census’ Household Pulse Survey, which began asking respondents about their disability and vaccine status in April 2021.
- Breakthrough cases by state, NYT: The New York Times has compiled and analyzed state data from on breakthrough (post-full-vaccination) COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This information is available for 40 states and Washington, D.C.; the remaining 10 states failed to share their data with the NYT. Raw data underlying this analysis have yet to be made public on the NYT GitHub repository.
- Education Stabilization Fund: The U.S. Department of Education has distributed a lot of money to school districts in the past year and a half—funding technology for remote learning, ventilation updates to buildings, COVID-19 tests, and more. This DOE database provides detailed records on which schools received funding and how much of the money has been spent.
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Featured sources, August 8
- School enrollment data from Big Local News: Stanford’s Big Local News program released a major dataset this week, allowing reporters to investigate the pandemic’s impact on school enrollment in their communities. The dataset includes enrollment data at the state, district, and school level for 33 states; it was compiled through a collaboration with OpenNews, the New York Times, and EdSource. To access the data, make an account on the Big Local News platform and search for “Stanford School Enrollment Project.” See this tutorial for more information on using the dataset.
- State-by-state hospitalization trends from the CDC: Last week, the CDC updated its COVID Data Tracker to include vaccination trends for every state. This week, the agency added hospitalization trends for every state, reflecting new COVID-19 admissions both overall and by age group. See the “Select a Jurisdiction” and “Select an Age Group” dropdown menus to explore the data.
- American Time Use Survey: This is a new survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS asked Americans how they spent their time during the COVID-19 pandemic; the resulting data demonstrate trends in remote work, commuting, childcare, and more. See the links at the bottom of this press release for comprehensive stats.
- Mirror, Mirror 2021 from the Commonwealth Fund: The Commonwealth Fund, a philanthropy foundation supporting healthcare research, published this new report comparing the U.S. healthcare system to those of ten other high-income nations. The report found, unsurprisingly, that the U.S. “ranks last overall, despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care.”
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Featured sources, August 1
- State-by-state vaccination trends from the CDC: The CDC’s COVID Data Tracker has a new feature, added on July 29: you can now see vaccination trends for every state. On the Vaccination Trends page, use the “Select a Location” dropdown menu to pick a specific state or territory, then check out day-by-day numbers and rolling averages for doses administered and people newly vaccinated in that region. You can also download the state’s time series data from a table underneath the chart.
- COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Cases: Data from the States (KFF): Looking to see how your state reports vaccine breakthrough cases? The Kaiser Family Foundation has you covered with this dashboard, including data and annotations from every state that reports breakthroughs. This resource was published on July 30; it’s unclear whether KFF intends to update it in the coming weeks.
- Poverty and Access to Internet, by County: Internet access has been a major issue during the pandemic as workplaces and schools have gone remote. This newly-updated dataset from the HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality provides information on internet and cellular access in every U.S. county from 2014 to 2018.
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Featured sources, July 25
- 2021 Health Disparities Report by America’s Health Rankings: This source isn’t specific to COVID-19, but it may be invaluable for reporting on the disparities worsened by the pandemic. America’s Health Rankings has put together comprehensive reports on national health data for decades; this is the first report to focus specifically on social determinants of health, including social, economic, physical environment, and other factors.
- COVID-19 Orphanhood Calculator: Researchers at Imperial College London built this dashboard to track one of the most dire consequences of the pandemic: children who lost their parents or primary caregivers to COVID-19. That group includes more than 1.5 million children worldwide, according to a recent study by the same researchers. The estimates are based on COVID-19 mortality data and fertility data.
- WHO COVID-19 Detailed Surveillance Data Dashboard: The World Health Organization has a new COVID-19 dashboard, and it’s incredibly detailed. Here, you can find testing data, case fatality ratios, cases and deaths by age, healthcare worker data, and more for all WHO member nations.
COVID-19 Data Dispatch 