Nationally, the current COVID-19 surge appears to be in a plateau. The number of new cases rose by just 5% this week, after a 3% rise last week. Hospitalizations are in a similar position: the number of patients in the hospital with COVID-19 has held steady at about 90,000 for the past two weeks.
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I invited Philip Nelson to contribute a post this week after reading his Tweets about his ongoing challenges in accessing his state’s hospitalization data. Basically, after Philip publicized a backend data service that enabled users to see daily COVID-19 patient numbers by individual South Carolina hospital, the state restricted this service’s use—essentially making the data impossible for outside researchers to analyze.
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A couple of additional items from this week’s COVID-19 headlines: children hospitalized with COVID-19, immunocompromised Americans now eligible for a third dose, and low cases linked to Lollapalooza.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of June 20 include the Delta variant, doctor vaccinations, and hospital closures.
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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.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of April 11 include healthcare worker deaths, hospitalization data, and food insecurity.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of Jan. 10 include a visualization of hospital facilities, therapeutics distribution, and hospital discharges.
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In the interest of giving credit to the HHS where credit is due: the agency updated its new facility-level hospitalization dataset right on schedule this past Monday. Last week, I used this hospitalization dataset—along with the HHS’s state-level hospitalization data—to build several visualizations showing how COVID-19 has hit hospitals at the individual, county, and state levels. I also wrote a brief article on COVID-19 hospitalizations for Stacker, hosting visualizations and highlighting some major insights.
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On Monday, the HHS published a new hospitalization dataset including capacity, new admissions, and other COVID-19-related numbers—for over 4,000 individual facilities across America. This is, as I put it in a COVID Tracking Project blog post analyzing the dataset, a big deal. Project lead Alexis Madrigal called it “probably the single most important data release that we’ve seen from the Federal government.” This post explains why the release is so exciting and what researchers may do with it.
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A new analysis, published this past Friday by the COVID Tracking Project, highlights how reliable the HHS dataset has become. The analysis compares HHS’s counts of hospitalized COVID-19 patients to the Project’s counts, compiled from states. This recent work benefits from HHS’s expanded metrics and more thorough documentation from both the federal agency and states, and it finds that the two datasets match well when adjusting for definitional differences.
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