COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: Nebraska

  • COVID source callout: Nebraska stops reporting wastewater data

    The Nebraska state health department has discontinued its wastewater surveillance data page, depriving residents of important COVID-19 updates at a time when cases are rising.

    Multiple local news outlets in the state (including the Omaha World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal-Star, and the radio station KIOS) reported the removal. Nebraska’s health department previously shared wastewater updates through PDF reports, published every two weeks; these reports included recent COVID-19 trends along with data about variants sequenced in the state’s sewage.

    Now, the health department’s wastewater surveillance page redirects to an error message, reading: “This page is currently unavailable.” The change came as wastewater data in Nebraska and across the country were showing an increase in coronavirus spread, local reporters covering the story have pointed out.

    Nebraska’s health department discontinued this webpage due to the federal public health emergency’s end in May, a spokesperson for the agency told the World-Herald and Journal-Star. The agency is still tracking wastewater data, the spokesperson said. But it’s apparently redesigning its public website to include as little information as possible.

    “Data continues to be tracked for that program and is available upon request,” the agency spokesperson told local reporters. Nebraska’s wastewater data still appear to be available on the CDC’s dashboard, as well. But new data for Nebraska sites were most recently added to that dashboard in early August, so it’s unclear whether CDC updates will continue after the local page’s end.

    Even if the Nebraska health department does continue sending data to the CDC, the national dashboard is less accessible to residents hoping to keep track of COVID-19 trends than the state’s reports were. As I’ve written before, local dashboards and alert systems are always better when it comes to tailoring updates for a specific community.

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  • Nebraska’s dashboard is back… Or is it?

    Nebraska’s dashboard is back… Or is it?

    Nebraska’s new, most likely short-lived, Hospital Capacity Dashboard. Screenshot taken on October 10.

    Last week, I called out the state of Nebraska for basically demolishing its COVID-19 vaccination data. I wrote that the state’s “Weekly Data Update” report now includes just two metrics: variants of concern and vaccine breakthroughs. This came after the state discontinued its comprehensive COVID-19 dashboard in late June. (You can see screenshots of the old dashboard here.)

    While I was correct in writing that Nebraska’s weekly update is now incredibly sparse, I missed that the state has, in fact, brought back its COVID-19 dashboard—kind-of. A New York Times article by Adeel Hassan and Lisa Waananen Jones alerted me to this update.

    Instead of resuming updates of the state’s previous dashboard, Nebraska’s state public health agency has now built a new, less comprehensive one, called the Nebraska Hospital Capacity Dashboard. As you might expect from the title, this new dashboard focuses on hospitalization data, such as the share of hospital beds available state-wide and by local public health region.

    But this new dashboard also includes some trends data (new cases, tests, and vaccinations by day, etc.) and demographics data. The demographics data are similar to what Nebraska provided on its old dashboard, reporting total cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and vaccinations by race, ethnicity, age, and gender.

    So, allow me to correct last week’s post: Nebraska is currently reporting more vaccination data than what the state is posting on its weekly reports page. However, the new dashboard, is short-lived, according to the NYT:

    On Sept. 20, after coronavirus hospitalizations surpassed 10 percent of the state’s capacity of staffed hospital beds, [Nebraska Governor Pete] Ricketts announced that county-level case data would once again be made public on a new “hospital capacity” state dashboard.

    But he said the data will disappear again if the number drops below 10 percent on a 7-day rolling average. And the state is still not reporting county-level deaths.

    Governor Ricketts ordered the new Hospital Capacity dashboard to be developed after public health experts and state legislators pushed for Nebraska to report more COVID-19 data. With limited state-level data and just a few Nebraska counties providing their own pandemic reports, residents were unable to see how the virus was spreading in their communities for all of July and August—when the Delta surge was at its worst.

    The new dashboard is a victory for Nebraska’s public health and medical experts. But state residents have very limited access to testing, leaving some experts to think the data on this dashboard may be “vast underestimates,” the NYT reports.

    Nebraska is not alone in cutting down on COVID-19 data reporting in recent months. Florida switched from a detailed dashboard and daily updates to pared-down weekly updates in June, and other states have stopped reporting on weekends or made other cuts. While the CDC and HHS continue to update their datasets daily, a lack of detailed data at the state level may heighten the challenge of another virus surge, if we see one this winter.

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  • Featured sources, July 11

    • COVID-19 Vaccination Equity: A new page of the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker allows users to compare a county’s vaccination rate to its vulnerability, using the CDC Social Vulnerability Index—unless that county is in Texas or Hawaii. For more on the Social Vulnerability Index, see this CDD post. The interactive map employs a unique two-tone color scheme, about which my girlfriend (who has graphic design expertise) said, “The purple loses me a little.”
    • US COVID-19 Vaccination Tracking: If you’d like to scroll through a county-level vaccine dashboard that actually includes Texas, researchers from the Bansal Lab at Georgetown University have you covered. This dashboard includes data from state public health departments to supplement the CDC’s incomplete reporting. The Bansal Lab researchers also recently published a new analysis, identifying clusters of under-vaccinated counties that are likely to seed outbreaks; I wrote about this analysis for the Daily Mail.
    • The human genetic architecture of COVID-19: Since spring 2020, an international group of geneticists have worked to analyze DNA from COVID-19 patients. A major manuscript on these efforts was accepted to Nature and posted online last week (it’s still going through edits); see the supplementary information section for extensive genetic data. And for more backstory on the project, see this article by STAT’s Megan Molteni.
    • Nebraska’s COVID-19 dashboard: Is the latest to get discontinued, as part of the trend in states cutting down on their COVID-19 reporting (even though the pandemic is far from over). Unlike Florida, which recently switched from a dashboard to weekly reports, Nebraska is not promising any regular reporting schedule. A note on the public health agency’s website reads: “The State of Nebraska COVID-19 Dashboard is no longer available as of June 30, 2021. Any future updates regarding coronavirus will be provided in news releases and through other means.”

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