SARS-CoV-2 Variant Classifications and Definitions. The CDC has updated its list of coronavirus variants that the agency is watching, including variants of concern, variants of interest and variants being monitored. Currently the only variant of concern, meaning that it poses as significant threat to the U.S., is the delta variant.
Website For Answering Vaccination Questions for People at High Risk for COVID-19:The California Chronic Care Coalition (CCCC), in collaboration with the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) and other partner organizations, have launched YourVaccinationGuide.org, a website designed to inform the public about all adult vaccinations, including those for COVID-19. The website is aimed at those at high risk for COVID-19 or other diseases but might have concerns about the safety of vaccines for COVID-19 and in general.
The website features a section on COVID-19 vaccines specifically, including frequently asked questions, as well as a general vaccination page containing information on other vaccines recommended for adults and teens. The website will be updated to provide the latest information on COVID-19 vaccines and will also soon be available in Spanish.
Community data: 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. On July 2, 2020, NACCHO released an update to its COVID-19 Data Lab that will allow users to see at a glance if there is a significant difference in case and death trends due to race in their state to help inform their pandemic response at the local level.
Testing and medical system capacity: American Public Media data reporters Geoff Hing and Will Craft created this tipsheet on where you can find data about COVID-19 testing and medical system capacity compiled from sources like NICAR-L list, NewsNerdery Slack, the Data is Plural newsletter, other reporting and browsing public health agency websites.
Testing tracker by volunteer journalists: Two journalists, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, built this tracker for a story in The Atlantic. The two efforts came together March 7, and made a call for volunteers to help keep the data updated, tune processes, work on scrapers, and make a website.Alexis Madrigal continues to lead the overall project.
The COVID Tracking Project collects information from 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and 5 other U.S. territories to provide the most comprehensive testing data we can collect for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Volunteers managing this tracker attempt to include positive and negative results, pending tests, and total people tested for each state or district currently reporting that data.
Scientists, Richard Neher and Emma Hodcroft, at the University of Basel in Switzerland, created a website called “Nextstrain” which is tracking the strains of COVID-19 as they mutate and spread around the world. Click on the site and watch the virus as it spreads around the world. Watch as it moves from Wuhan and eventually to the United States. Labs around the world are sequencing the genomes of the virus taken from sick people with COVID-19 and then uploading it into a database overseen by Neher and Hodcraft, who are then inputting the data into the website for everyone to see. It is worth taking a look.
Disparities: There is growing concern about racial and ethnic disparities in the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, the Solutions Journalism Network, which helps journalists use data in finding and reporting evidence-based solutions stories, assembled a database of state and local governments that are reporting cases and deaths disaggregated by race and ethnicity, with links to the data. Journalists can use the numbers to highlight disparities in their region and compared it other the situation to other parts of the country.
See the state-by-state data set here.
And here is the story.