CDC’s COVID-19 Wastewater surveillance tracker: The agency recently added this tracking tool to its COVID-19 dashboard. Public health officials are sampling wastewater — water that returns to the public utility system after it’s been used for an everyday purpose — flushing a toilet, bathing, washing dishes, etc. — at more than 200 locations in 10 states to detect traces of SARS-CoV-2, which is shed in the feces of those who are infected with the virus. The tracker offers a picture of national COVID-19 trends — an uptick or downtick in SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater has consistently preceded an increase or decrease in COVID-19 cases. For example, between the weeks of Jan. 23 and Feb. 6, there was a decline in SARS-CoV-2 in the wastewater in most locations, and the number of COVID-19 cases is now falling too.
Jeremy Faust, M.D., M.S., an emergency room doctor and health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Benjy Renton, of Ariadne Labs at Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard Chan School of Public HealthCheck created this “circuit breaker status” map of U.S. counties that indicates which hospitals are at high risk for being overwhelmed in the next one to 10 days by SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospital capacity.
The Morehouse School of Medicine has created a dashboard for tracking the racial and ethnic data related to COVID-19. The Morehouse Tracker incorporates data from the CDC, the Census, and other sources to provide comprehensive information on cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and showing which communities have been hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. See here: https://healthequitytracker.org/exploredata
To get vaccination numbers for U.S. states, counties, and metropolitan areas in an easily downloadable format go to the Department of Health and Human Service’s new Community Profile Report page Here: https://beta.healthdata.gov/Health/COVID-19-Community-Profile-Report/gqxm-d9w9
These report will help local reporters find COVID-19 data, including information on cases, deaths, PCR tests, hospitalizations—and now, vaccines for communities.
For counties and metro areas, the reports include numbers and percentages of people who have been fully vaccinated, reported for the overall population and for those 65 and older. For states, the reports include more comprehensive information that matches the data available at the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker.
In February 2021, a group of international epidemiologists, backed by Google, launched Global.health, a huge open-access epidemiological data collection site. Scientists can access up to 10 million anonymized Covid-19 records from 160 countries. Each record contains up to 40 data points about cases, including demographics, travel history, testing dates, and outcomes. The project was inspired by a spreadsheet in the pandemic’s earliest days, an effort born when a group of epidemiologists decided to collect and openly share granular data on individual Covid-19 cases around the world. See the Stat story about the site.
HHS Coronavirus Data Hub: HHS needed a central way to make data collected by various operating divisions, including CDC, CMS, HRSA, and others, visible to first responders at federal, state, and local levels and it needed to collect this data as fast as possible. To fulfill this need, HHS built HHS Protect, a secure data ecosystem powered by eight commercial technologies for sharing, parsing, housing, and accessing COVID-19 data and driven by four principles: transparency, sharing, privacy, and security.
Here are the World Health Organization‘s daily situation reports on the coronavirus.
White House Coronavirus Task Force reports on individual states: The White House Coronavirus Task Force issues weekly reports to governors about the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it doesn’t make these reports public, even though they contain data about where infection rates are rising. The Center for Public Integrity has stepped in to collect and publish the reports on its website. The center so has obtained reports from 29 states. To access them, go here, then scroll down the page about halfway.
COVID-19 Research database: A public/private database created by a partnership including: Datavant, Health Care Cost Institute, Medidata, Mirador Analytics, Veradigm, Change Healthcare, Snowflake and many others research database enables public health and policy researchers to use real-world data to better understand and combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The database is a pro-bono, cross-industry collaborative, composed of institutions donating technology service, healthcare expertise, and limited and de-identified data. Data include health insurance and state mortality information.
Nextstrain tracks the strains of COVID-19 as they mutate and spread around the world. Scientists Richard Neher and Emma Hodcroft, at the University of Basel in Switzerland, created the website. Click on the site and watch the virus as it spreads around the world. Labs around the world are sequencing the genomes of the virus taken from people with COVID-19 and uploading it into a database overseen by Neher and Hodcraft, who then input the data for everyone to see.
The LA-based media production company Wondros created a COVID-19 Navigator, dashboard that has collated information about the disease from the Centers for Disease Control, Consumer Reports, CNN the National Institutes of Health, the LA Times, USA Today and the World Health Organization. The Dashboard features five buttons that lead to a deeper dive on facts about Covid-19, such, getting what you need, staying inside, staying safe and what happens next. For example, the “Getting What I Need” button covers advice on grocery shopping, ordering from restaurants, home deliveries, prescriptions and seeing the doctor for non-urgent needs. Another one covers myths about COVID-19, which says: Misinformation is circulating about the virus. First and foremost, COVID-19 is not a hoax. Also, hot baths, cold weather, UV lamps and pneumonia vaccination do not prevent coronavirus. For more myths and facts visit the World Health Organization website.
Stanford University’s Big Local News and Pitch Interactive — with support from the Google News Initiative — created the COVID-19 Case Mapper to make it possible for local journalists and others to easily embed up-to-date coronavirus map visualizations on their websites. The map offers state and county views, with a simple interface for embedding on a site. The numbers behind the map automatically update, pulling in data collected daily and made public by The New York Times. The goal was to make something easy for local journalists to use so they can concentrate on other important stories.
The Surgo Foundation, a philanthropy organization based in the U.S. and London, created this COVID-19 community vulnerability map, utilizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social vulnerability index data, which predicts the expected negative impact of any disaster. The tool is aimed at helping communities determine where best to allocate resources. Take a look to see if your community might be considered vulnerable.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has launched a COVID-19 state tracker that they expect to update daily. Among the state-level data you’ll find in the tracker:
• COVID-19 cases and deaths
• State policy actions, including emergency declarations; steps to waive cost sharing for COVID-19 testing and prior authorization requirements; paid sick leave; special enrollment periods in Affordable Care Act Marketplaces; early prescription refills and free cost vaccine for COVID-19 when one becomes available.
• Provider capacity, including numbers of hospital beds as well as numbers of community health centers and health center delivery sites.
Guided by common values, Covid Act Now is a multidisciplinary team of technologists, epidemiologists, health experts, and public policy leaders working to provide disease intelligence and data analysis on COVID in the U.S. The site published its first version of the model on March 20. More than 10 million Americans have used the model since. They’ve engaged with dozens of federal, state, and local government officials, including the U.S. military and White House, to assist with response planning.
COVID-19 Projections (U.S. and state-by state data) from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), independent global health researchers at the University of Washington.
COVID-19 Compiler aims to display relevant data about the novel coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The goal is to provide a multidimensional view of COVID-19’s impact in counties across the US encompassing the mapping of vulnerable populations, state and local policies to reduce transmission, and data on medical / health care resources. The site is updated daily with the latest data available on the outbreak. This site was designed and developed by Topos, a machine learning and location intelligence startup based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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