Today we published our final weekly update. COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations continue to decline, while tests are up 12 percent. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
Although holiday and storm-related reporting disruptions appear to have affected reported cases, tests, and deaths in recent weeks, the data does not currently suggest that case or death declines are reversing.
The sustained decline in cases and hospitalizations is very encouraging, but with multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 gaining footholds in US cities, it remains vitally important to further reduce the virus’s spread via masking, social distancing, and avoiding indoor gatherings.
As we wind down data compilation, we are publishing more introductions to federal COVID-19 datasets. Today we added a look at federal data on COVID-19 in nursing homes. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
We also wrote up a brief introduction to the easiest ways to keep up-to-date on the pandemic using CDC and other federal data. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
Our final day of data compilation—and daily tweets—will be this Sunday, March 7—but our work isn’t quite done. Our teams are working on several in-depth analyses of federal and state data, and we will also be publishing documentation about every part of the project.
The federal government is now publishing more and better COVID-19 data than ever before. To those of you who’ve relied on our work this year, thank you for your trust. We’ve tried very hard to deserve it, and we believe that we’re leaving you in good hands.
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Since The COVID Tracking Project is winding down on March 7, we’re packaging up what we’ve learned about federal COVID-19 data in a 101 series. Up today: federal testing data. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
Unlike case, death, and hospitalization data, federal testing data doesn’t match well to the state data we collect. The discrepancies point to problems with both state and federal data sources. Our deep dive on that: covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
Thankfully, federal testing data is standardized, unlike our patchwork testing dataset. But the data can be incomplete—especially in 5 states that still can’t submit data to the federal government:
For our API users: Yesterday, we switched totalTestResults to use values from totalTestsViral instead of being calculated from positive+negative in 4 states: IL, ME, MI, and SD.
These switches caused the totalTestResults field to increase by ~325k (cumulatively). The increases were driven by MI and SD, because our old totalTestResults counted MI positives and SD positives and negatives in units of unique people instead of specimens.
To get more testing history, we changed ME’s testing data source to one that counts residents only instead of residents and nonresidents. ME’s other COVID-19 data only counts residents, so the new source better matches the rest.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.4 million tests, 67k cases, 45,462 currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 2,449 deaths.
The number of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 has dropped dramatically since the start of the year. Each day, the total drops by about 2%.
VA is still reconciling death certificates from the post holiday surge. As a result, their death count is artificially inflated. Nationally, deaths are still declining.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.3 million tests, 54k cases, 46,388 currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 1,885 deaths.
Zooming in... Two weeks ago, storm-related outages drove down case reporting. Last week, those cases filled in and sent the average higher. Now, a full two weeks later, the numbers seem to be settling out.
Cases vary by day of the week. This is the fewest number of cases reported on a Tuesday since October 13.