COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: reporting frequency

  • COVID source callout: CDC shifts to weekly updates

    This week, the CDC announced a big change to its COVID-19 data reporting: instead of updating case and death numbers daily, the figures will be updated weekly. The change comes into effect on October 20.

    Under the new schedule, data updates will be cut off on Wednesdays, though it’s unclear if the CDC will actually update its dashboard on Wednesdays or if this will happen on a day later in the week.

    According to the CDC’s data FAQ page, this change was made “to allow for additional reporting flexibility, reduce the reporting burden on states and jurisdictions, and maximize surveillance resources.” To me, this makes a lot of sense: as case data become increasingly less reliable (thanks to increased at-home testing, closing PCR sites, etc.), daily updates can be more misleading than they are valuable. Most states are not reporting daily data either.

    Also, much as it pains me to say this, the CDC’s COVID-19 dashboard is very likely not getting the views and attention that it received one or two years ago. If this change frees up agency data scientists to work on new tracking mechanisms that will be more useful, that seems like a fair trade-off to me. But it’s still a bummer to see the daily data go, especially at a time when we really need information to track a potential fall surge.

    Worth noting: the HHS Community Profile Reports are updating on a weekly cadence now as well.

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  • COVID source callout: CDC takes weekends off

    If you went to pretty much any page on the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker this week, you might have noticed a new alert at the top of the page:

    Beginning July 4, 2022, COVID Data Tracker will discontinue daily data refreshes 7 days per week, and will instead refresh data Monday through Friday.

    In other words, the CDC is following in the footsteps of many state and local health departments across the country in taking weekends off from COVID-19 updates. This is pretty unsurprising, considering how many long weekends the agency’s COVID-19 tracking team has taken recently (see: last week’s callout post).

    Indeed, only five states are still updating their COVID-19 dashboards daily, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. But the CDC’s move is still disappointing, as it represents yet another step away from this national public health agency fulfilling its responsibilities to inform Americans about the pandemic.

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  • Sources and updates, April 10

    • Lessons learned from the non-superspreader Anime NYC convention: Last fall, one of the first Omicron cases detected in the U.S. was linked to the Anime NYC convention, a gathering of more than 50,000 fans. Many worried that the event had been a superspreader for this highly contagious variant, but an investigation from the CDC later found that, in fact, Omicron spread at the convention was minimal. My latest feature story for Science News unpacks what we can learn from this event about preventing infectious disease spread—not just COVID-19—at future large events. I am a big anime fan (and have actually attended previous iterations of Anime NYC!), so this was a very fun story for me; I hope you give it a read!
    • States keep reducing their data reporting frequency: Last Sunday, I noted that Florida—one of the first states to shift from daily to weekly COVID-19 data updates—has now gone down to updating its data every other week. This is part of an increasing trend, writes Beth Blauer from the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data team in a recent blog post. “As of March 30, only eight states and territories (AR, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA, PR, and TX) report case data every day of the week,” Blauer says. And it seems unlikely that states will increase reporting frequencies again without a major change in public health funding or the state of the pandemic.
    • Biden administration announces Long COVID task force: This week, the Biden administration issued a memo addressing the millions of Americans living with Long COVID. The administration is creating a new, interagency task force, with the goal of developing a “national research action plan” on Long COVID, as well as a report laying out services and resources that can be directed to people experiencing this condition. It’s worth noting that recent estimates from the U.K. indicate 1.7 million people in that country (or one in every 37 residents) are living with Long COVID; current numbers in the U.S. are unknown due to data gaps, but are likely on a similar scale, if not higher. 
    • New scientific data sharing site from the NIH: Not directly COVID-related, but an exciting new source: the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has created an online data repository for projects funded by and affiliated with the agency. The site currently includes over 100 datasets, including scientific data, genomic data, and clinical data; it also includes information on data management and sharing for researchers working on these projects. This press release from NIH has more info. (H/t Liz Essley Whyte.)
    • Study indicates continued utility for COVID-19 testing in schools: During the Omicron surge, testing programs in a lot of schools collapsed, simply because institutions didn’t have enough resources to handle all of the students and staff getting sick. The surge led some schools to consider whether school testing programs are worth continuing at all. But a new study, released last week in The Lancet, suggests that yes, surveillance testing can still reduce transmission—even when schools are dealing with highly contagious variants. (Note that this was a modeling study, not a real-world trial.)
    • Preprint shows interest in self-reporting antigen test results: Another interesting study released recently: researchers at the University of Massachusetts distributed three million free rapid, at-home antigen tests between April and October 2021, then studied how test recipients interacted with a digital app for ordering tests and logging results. About 8% of test recipients used the app, the researchers found; but more than 75% of those who used it did report their antigen test results to their state health agency. The results (which haven’t yet been peer-reviewed) suggest that, if institutions make it easy and accessible for people to self-report their test results, the reporting will happen.

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  • COVID source callout: Florida, again

    Last summer, Florida was one of the first states to decommission its daily COVID-19 dashboard and replace it with far-less-detailed weekly reports. Many other states have followed Florida’s lead in the last few months, making their reporting less frequent and cutting down on some metrics like cases and testing.

    But that’s not enough for Florida! The state recently switched from weekly COVID-19 reports to reports every other week—making it even more difficult for reporters, researchers, and others in the state to follow their local COVID-19 trends. Florida additionally stopped reporting cases in non-state residents, which is pretty notable for one of the country’s biggest tourism hotspots.

    Of course, Florida is still reporting some COVID-19 data daily to the federal government, as all states are required to do. But this doesn’t bode well for the future of state data reporting.

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  • COVID source callout: Kentucky

    COVID source callout: Kentucky

    While updating my vaccine data annotations yesterday, I noticed that Kentucky has made some changes to its COVID-19 data reporting. Kentucky’s state health department has switched from daily to weekly updates, following a common trend in state reporting over the past few weeks.

    But this state also downgraded its vaccination data: it has, as far as I can tell, stopped publishing a report of vaccinations by race, ethnicity, and other demographic categories (previously posted once a week). And Kentucky’s new COVID-19 dashboard includes a “Weekly Surveillance Data” tab with, truly, some of the lowest-quality data visualizations I have seen throughout the entire course of the pandemic.

    Kentucky, what is going on with this image quality?

    Like, you can’t even read these numbers! Admittedly, the dashboard links out to a PDF report with better-quality visualizations, but it’s still a far cry from interactive or downloadable data. Two years into the pandemic, states are still struggling with reporting their numbers in an accessible manner.

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  • COVID source callout: Iowa ends COVID-19 dashboards

    On February 16, Iowa’s two COVID-19 dashboards—one dedicated to vaccination data, and one for other major metrics—will be decommissioned. The end of these dashboards follows the end of Iowa’s public health emergency declaration, on February 15.

    In a statement announcing the end of the public health emergency, Iowa Governor Kim Reynold assures residents that “the state health department will continue to review and analyze COVID-19 and other public health data daily.” Data reporting on COVID-19 will be more closely aligned to reporting on the flu and other respiratory diseases, she said. Even though COVID-19 is causing the death of more than 100 Iowa residents a week, according to CDC data.

    Iowa used to be the state with the most frequent COVID-19 data reporting, with a dashboard that updated multiple times an hour. In fact, I wrote an ode to its frequent updates here at the COVID-19 Data Dispatch, back in fall 2020. But now, Iowa joins Florida, Nebraska, and other states in ending its public health emergency and, consequently, severely downgrading the level of information that it’s providing to residents who are very much still living in a public health emergency.

    At least the state will continue providing regular updates to the CDC—those requirements haven’t changed.

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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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  • COVID source callout: Nebraska’s weekly updates

    COVID source callout: Nebraska’s weekly updates

    On June 30, Nebraska’s public health department discontinued its COVID-19 dashboard. The dashboard had provided daily updates for cases, deaths, vaccinations, and other metrics. After June 30, it was replaced with a stripped-down “Weekly Data Update,”  providing a few major metrics, such as the cases reported and vaccine doses administered in the past week. This update is posted every Wednesday.

    When I checked on Nebraska yesterday for an update of my vaccine annotations page, I was shocked to find that the state’s Weekly Update has been pared down even further. It now includes just two metrics: variants of concern and vaccine breakthroughs. Nebraska’s health department is reporting: 1) the total cases identified as variants of concern in the state, and 2) total cases, hospitalizations, and deaths split by “fully vaccinated” and “not fully vaccinated.”

    This is literally the entire report. Screenshot taken on October 3.

    Compared to the detailed dashboard this state used to produce, this weekly update is incredibly sparse. It reminds me of a state COVID-19 data page from the early days of the pandemic—like, March 2020. If any local journalists from Nebraska are reading: I am so sorry.

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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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  • States scale down COVID-19 reporting frequency

    States scale down COVID-19 reporting frequency

    State reporting frequencies, via NPR.

    Two weeks ago, I reported that Florida had made a big change to its COVID-19 data reporting: the state switched from daily updates to weekly updates. Previously, Florida had maintained a dashboard and released detailed PDF reports each day; now, the state releases PDF reports once a week on Fridays.

    Other states are making similar changes. Only about half of states update their COVID-19 data every day, NPR reported last week. Florida is the only state to cut back to only one update a week, but several others now skip updating on weekends or otherwise reduce their reporting load.

    It’s important to note, however, that these changes are not all new. There have always been states that skipped updating—or published limited updates—on weekends, going back to spring 2020. And, for a long time, Kansas was the least-frequent-reporting state: for many months, it’s only published updates on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. More states started skipping weekends earlier in 2021, though, at the same time as many state public health agencies were spinning up vaccination dashboards in addition to their existing COVID-19 reporting systems. 

    When states do not update their data every day, journalists and researchers are less able to precisely track COVID-19 developments and identify trends. John Hopkins’ Beth Blauer compared this challenge to viewing a photo in low resolution instead of high resolution: it’s harder to see a pattern when you’re not getting as much detail.

    Even for those states that do publish updates every day, though, there are still challenges inherent in interpreting data that naturally fluctuate over the course of a week. New York might update its COVID-19 data every day, for example, but some test sites in New York are closed on weekends—leading to natural dips in testing and case numbers on those days, followed by higher numbers in the middle of the week. COVID Tracking Project volunteer Hannah Hoffman has written about this phenomenon in detail.

    Still, even as states start to skip days or make their reporting less precise, the CDC and HHS continue to update their national COVID-19 datasets daily. There are admittedly many discrepancies between federal and state data—in large part because of the lack of federal leadership early in the pandemic—but the federal data are now highly standardized and reliable at a level that would be incredibly difficult to get from states. This is why I personally choose to use the CDC’s dashboard for COVID-19 Data Dispatch weekly updates, rather than JHU or another source that aggregates from states.

    It’s also important to acknowledge that state public health agencies have been chronically underfunded for decades before the pandemic hit—and daily data updates have been a huge timesuck for many of these agencies. If scaling down COVID-19 dashboard updates frees up some personnel and resources for a state like Alabama or South Dakota to redirect into vaccination programs, that, to me, seems worthwhile.

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