On September 2, 2022, the federal government stopped taking orders for free at-home COVID-19 tests. The day this program ended, I sent a public records request to the federal government asking for data on how many tests were distributed. I just received some data back from my request; here’s what the numbers show.
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COVID-19 is still a public health emergency. At the moment, this is true according to both the general definition of this term and official declarations by the federal government. But the latter could change in the coming months, likely leading to more fragmentation in U.S. COVID-19 data.
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This past Friday, the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services held a briefing previewing two major reports about Long COVID.
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Last week, I shared a new page from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), reporting statistics on COVID-19 therapeutic distribution in the U.S. The new dataset is a helpful step, but it falls far short of the information we actually need to examine who has access to COVID-19 treatments (particularly Paxlovid) and address potential health equity issues.
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A record number of COVID-19 patients are now receiving care in U.S. hospitals, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Even so, reports from the doctors and other staff working in these hospitals—conveyed in the news and on social media—suggest that the HHS data don’t capture the current crisis. The federal data may be reported with delays and fail to capture the impact of staffing shortages, obscuring the fact that many regions and individual hospitals are currently operating at 100% capacity.
Read MoreWe’re now approaching almost a year since the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) first started publicly releasing Community Profile Reports, massive documents containing COVID-19 data at the state, county, and metro area levels.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of November 7 include school learning modes, testing technologies, and federal contractors.
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The Community Profile Reports, those extensive PDF reports and Excel files that contain everything from vaccination coverage to hospital capacity, are now published on Tuesdays and Fridays only. (Previously, these reports were posted every day.)
Read MoreHospital worker vaccination rates, a new study modeling COVID-19 deaths, a New York Times mix-up, and more.
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This week, the HHS added hospital admissions by age to its state-level hospitalization dataset. Now, if you want to see a patient breakdown for your state, you can simply look at the state-level info already compiled by HHS data experts, rather than summing up numbers from the facility-level info yourself.
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