The HHS changed their reporting requirements, no longer requiring hospitals to include COVID-19 deaths that occur at their facilities in daily reports. BUT: This is not the end of U.S. COVID-19 death reporting. The CDC’s death reporting system is continuing as usual.
Read MoreOn Friday, a COVID-19 Data Dispatch reader asked for my help in interpreting a wildly high positivity rate: 544% in Washington, D.C. The source of this rate, she said, was John Hopkins University (JHU)’s COVID-19 dashboard.
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It can take weeks for a COVID-19 test sample to go from a patient’s nose to a nationwide sequencing database, which leads to inevitable lags in the U.S.’s genomic surveillance—and means that public data sources fail to convey the variant’s rapid spread.
Read MoreThe CDC has not updated its breakthrough case data since September. A full two months ago.
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As I updated my vaccine data source annotations this weekend, I found that the state of Illinois has overhauled its COVID-19 dashboard… and taken down most of its vaccination data.
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In last week’s newsletter, I gave a shout-out to the Salt Lake County Health Department, which posted vaccination rates by Zodiac sign on Twitter. It drew a lot of attention, but the local agency’s analysis might not be particularly robust.
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Since August 13, the CDC’s dashboard says, about 7.3 million Americans have received a third dose. These booster shots are obfuscating the country’s vaccination trends. Over one million people have been vaccinated every day for the past week, but roughly half of those people were getting their booster shots.
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On June 30, Nebraska’s public health department discontinued its COVID-19 dashboard. Recently, the state pared down its data reporting even further.
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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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We’ve noted in recent months that several states have scaled down their COVID-19 reporting: states are providing fewer metrics, updating their dashboards less frequently, or both. According to the UCLA COVID Behind Bars data project, these changes are also hitting state carceral agencies—responsible for reporting COVID-19 cases in prisons and jails—right as Delta causes new outbreaks in these facilities.
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