This past Friday, the CDC’s COVID-19 data team announced that its newsletter, the COVID Data Tracker Weekly Review, will send its final issue on Friday, May 12. That’s the day after the federal public health emergency for COVID-19 ends.
This week, the Bachelor tested positive for COVID-19. As both an avid watcher of the franchise and a COVID-19 reporter, I was immediately curious to see how the production would handle this. Unfortunately, the show was pretty sparse on safety details.
For several days now, the New York City Department of Education’s COVID-19 case map has had a significant error: on this dashboard, a number of schools are erroneously located in Colombia. Like, the South American country.
The CDC is now updating its COVID-19 cases and deaths data weekly, instead of daily. This shift goes beyond the agency’s public dashboard: the CDC has also archived datasets with state- and county-level data providing COVID-19 cases and deaths.
The CDC provided a fairly normal variant data update this week. Be wary of sensationalist Twitter personalities who want you to think some kind of conspiracy is going on.
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.
If you went to check Biobot’s COVID-19 wastewater dashboard this week, you may have noticed that the company hasn’t updated its data since September 14. The company’s lab is closed for a retreat.
You might have seen this statistic from President Biden or other White House officials: “COVID deaths are down nearly 90%.” The statistic is misleading and incorrect, to the point that I’d consider it misinformation—especially right now, as the U.S. faces a largely-ignored surge.
Many of the public health failures we saw early in the COVID-19 crisis are now being repeated with monkeypox—which the WHO just declared a global health emergency.