The National Institutes of Health created the National COVID Cohort Collaborative to collate deidentified electronic health record data on COVID19. The Collaborative data is available for free to academic researchers, clinicians and citizen scientists and includes data on adult COVID-19 cases, pediatric COVID-19 cases, medications, Long-COVID, reinfections, mortality and COVID-19 patients with diabetes and who smoke. See here for the site and to download data. The data from the site has provided insight into question such as the mortality risk for those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Assessing one’s personal risk for dying from or becoming hospitalized from COVID-19 is extremely challenging, so epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina did it for all of us and in real-world examples that we can all understand. Check out her charts and data here, which she compiled for her newsletter “Your Local Epidemiologist.” Here are a few examples of risk evaluations based on her calculations: “For a vaccinated 18-49 year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection is less than the annual risk of dying on the road.” And “For an unvaccinated 65 year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection is about as risky as 1.5 years of heroin use.”
The National Institutes of Health has created an open access data resources platform on COVID-19 for researchers. These resources are being provided by federal agencies, including NIH, public consortia, and private entities.
Vaccine Tracker: Bloomberg News has created this comprehensive tracker of COVID vaccine doses administered in the United States and globally. The site has a nice map and consistency updated data.
Population Level Analysis and Community Estimates: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded its 500 Cities Project, a 2016 initiative to provide city- and neighborhood-level health estimates for a large portion of the nation’s population. The project is being renamed PLACES, and provides Population Level Analysis and Community Estimates to the entire United States to show the prevalence of chronic diseases and the health impacts on underserved communities. PLACES provides data estimates for 27 health measures for four U.S. geographic levels: counties, incorporated and census-designated places, census tracts, and ZIP codes. The chronic disease measures focus on health outcomes, unhealthy behaviors, and prevention practices that have a substantial impact on people’s health. The CDC says PLACES can be used to:
- Inform target prevention activities, programs, and policies;
- Identify emerging health problems and priority health risk behaviors;
- Identify and understand geographic health-related issues;
- Establish key health goals; and
- Identify geographic disparities in health among and within communities to inform strategies that address health equity.
Risk Assessment tools: Without national guidelines, individuals have been left to determine what activities are safe and what are not when it comes to the risk of becoming infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. To help, these two sites estimate risk. One is called the microCOVID project, which estimates an individuals’ risk based on location, the number of people the activity will involve, mask types, and more. Another site is Georgia Tech’s COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool. This tool provides precise information about risk levels in states and counties.
CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics has estimates on a selected number of key issues, such as loss of work due to illness with COVID-19, telemedicine access and use before and during the pandemic, and reduced access to specific types of health care due to the pandemic. The data come from the Research and Development Survey (RANDS), a platform designed for conducting survey question evaluation and statistical research. RANDS estimates were generated using an experimental approach that differs from the survey design approaches generally used by NCHS, including possible biases from different response patterns and increased variability from lower sample sizes. Use of the RANDS platform allowed NCHS to produce more timely data than would have been possible using traditional data collection methods. The first of two rounds of RANDS during COVID-19 data collection occurred between June 9, 2020 and July 6, 2020 and are presented on the web site. On Aug. 26, 2020, NCHS hosted a webinar on RANDS. To learn more, visit this link.
The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), which represents the country’s nearly 3,000 local health departments, launched its COVID-19 Data Lab, a data tool for people to see the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on local communities. NACCHO plans to keep evolving the site over time, as more information is gathered about the outbreak. In the first iteration, users can access the interactive COVID-19 Dashboard to explore the extent of COVID-19 tests, cases, and deaths in communities and counties. Going forward, additional data points will be included, as available, to provide clearer, more nuanced information critical to supporting the COVID-19 response at the community level. See the link here: https://covid19-naccho.hub.arcgis.com/
Live tracker: How many coronavirus cases have been reported in each U.S. state? Beatrice Jin, Politico
The Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering built and is regularly updating an online dashboard for tracking the worldwide spread of the coronavirus outbreak that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The site displays statistics about deaths and confirmed cases of coronavirus, or 2019-nCoV, across a worldwide map. It also allows visitors to download the data for free. “We think it is important for the public to have an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds with transparent data sources,” said Lauren Gardner, a civil engineering professor and Johns Hopkins’ Center for Systems Science and Engineering co-director,. “For the research community, this data will become more valuable as we continue to collect it over time.” The statistics behind the data visualization are being collected from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, and Dingxiangyuan, a social networking site for health care professionals that provides real-time information on cases.
Journalist Matt Kauffman has compiled a list of more than 50 state, county and municipal governments that have made available COVID-related data by race and ethnicity. This blog post explains the spreadsheet.