February 28, 2021.Reading time 18 minutes.
Our second workshop happened this week! Liz Essley Whyte, an investigative reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, discussed her work bringing White House COVID-19 reports to the public before they were officially released. Erica Hensley, an independent health and data journalist based in Jackson, Mississippi, provided advice for navigating relationships with local public health officials based on her work reporting on COVID-19 in Mississippi. And Tom Meagher, a senior editor at The Marshall Project, described the communication and coordination work behind his newsroom’s yearlong tracker of COVID-19 in the U.S. prison system. Thank you to everyone who attended!
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February 21, 2021.Reading time 13 minutes.
Our first workshop happened this week! Drew Armstrong, Bloomberg News’s senior editor for health care, talked about his work on the publication’s Vaccine Tracker; and Arielle Levin Becker, director of communications and strategic initiatives for the Connecticut Health Foundation, discussed how to navigate COVID-19 race and ethnicity data. Thank you to everyone who attended—we had a great turnout!
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December 20, 2020.Reading time 12 minutes.
This past week, the first COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to frontline healthcare workers across the country. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorization to a second vaccine. But I haven’t seen a vaccination dashboard from the CDC. This federal agency is lagging behind several states that are making their vaccination counts public, as well as journalists who have already begun to compile the limited information that’s available.
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August 16, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.
A new form on the COVID Tracking Project website allows you to help advocate for better race and ethnicity data. Simply select your state, then use the contact information and suggested script to get in touch with your governor. States with specific data issues (such as Texas and West Virginia) have customized scripts explaining those problems.
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August 16, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
The COVID Tracking Project published a blog post this week in which three of our resident Texas experts, Conor Kelly, Judith Oppenheim, and Pat Kelly, describe a dramatic shift in Texas testing numbers which has taken place in the past two weeks. On August 2, the number of tests reported by Texas’s Department of State Health Services (DSHS) began to plummet. The state went from a reported 60,000 tests per day at the end of July to about half that number by August 12.
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August 16, 2020.Reading time 24 minutes.
This past Monday, I had the pleasure of speaking to Delaware State Auditor Kathy McGuiness. Auditor McGuiness was elected to her position in 2018, and she hit the ground running by implementing new ways for Delaware residents to report fraud and keep track of how their taxpayer dollars were being spent. Now, State Auditor McGuiness is focused on COVID-19. She spearheaded the creation of a standardized template that she and other state auditors will use to evaluate their states’ COVID-19 data collection and reporting. The template, created in collaboration with auditors from Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, is a rubric which watchdog offices may use as a baseline in determining which datasets they examine and which questions they ask of state politicians and public health officials.
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August 2, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
This past Tuesday, several top state auditors announced a joint initiative: they’re going to review how state COVID-19 data are collected and reported. Auditors from five states—Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—worked with the National State Auditors Association to put together a framework that every state can use. 13 other states, as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico, have already expressed interest in using the framework.
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July 26, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
The U.S. urgently needs better standards for COVID-19 data at national, state, and local levels, argues Resolve to Save Lives, a nongovernmental initiative run by the global health organization Vital Strategies. Resolve is led by President and CEO Dr. Tom Frieden, a former Director of the CDC; he worked with other public health experts on a report which reviewed the availability of COVID-19 data in the U.S.
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