Our daily update is published. States reported 1.2 million tests, 41k cases, 40,212 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 839 deaths. This is our final day of data collection after a very long year.
The project was initially created to track testing. The first few days, states reported just a few thousand total tests. Today, states reported 1.2 million tests. The single-day high for the year was December 5 at 2.3 million. Cumulatively, we've tracked 363 million tests.
We ended up tracking other metrics. Cases reached heights we never could have imagined in the early days. The 7-day average got to 250 thousand cases per day in early January. Today, states reported the fewest number of cases since October 6, before the winter surge.
Hospitalizations have also fallen from highs over 130 thousand down to just over 40 thousand today.
Deaths have tracked the other metrics, at a delay, as they have through the pandemic. This is the first day we've seen fewer than 1000 deaths reported since November 29, more than 3 months ago.
It's impossible to take in the sweep of the pandemic. But on this day last year, fewer than 20 people were known to have died from COVID-19 in the US. There were only 574 cases. Now, 10 states have seen more than 1 in 500 of their residents killed during the pandemic.
Our data collection ends today, but the CTP will continue publishing accountability work. We want to use our knowledge of the nation's data to show how we might fix the structural problems we've identified.
We have many thank yous. First, to the frontline healthcare workers, who risked their lives to treat this emerging disease.
Second, thank you to the health department officials who gathered up the data that we compile. We know that we are merely the last step that this data takes. What you all have done, despite funding cuts and impossible hours, is the definition of public service.
We couldn’t have done this work for an entire year without being able to give stipends to some of the people who worked on it full-time. Thanks to our funders—and the folks who donated the software that we ran on. covidtracking.com/aboutcovidtracking.com/about/software
Our project's key value is a culture of gratitude, saying thank you even for things that are a normal part of the job. In this year where so much has come at all of us, it has helped to remember that at the very least, we have each other to be thankful for.
In the beginning of the pandemic, @edyong209 told us that natural disasters bring people together, but pandemics tear people apart. We like to think that CTP was an active protest against those divisions.
And—this is @alexismadrigal and @kissane—we have to thank CTP’s contributors. This project came out of nothing. You became its blood and bones. We know how much you sacrificed—jobs, school, kidtime—and how much it sometimes hurt to handle the numbers that defined this year.
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In the last of our rolling updates to our totalTestResults API field before we end data collection tomorrow, we switched totalTestResults for MT, NM, and WV from summing positive+negative to drawing data directly from totalTestsViral. covidtracking.com/about-data/tot…
These changes close the book on work we began in August 2020 to improve the data in totalTestResults. When our project began, most states shared positive and negative results only, so we summed those figures to calculate totals for every state. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
Switching each state’s totalTestResults from calculated to explicit numbers required getting complete historical testing data from states. We tried to get the data in units of tests—not people—because counting tests better captures testing volume.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.7M tests, 69k cases, 42,541 currently hospitalized, and 2,221 deaths.
This is our final weekday update. We'll tweet our last daily data this Sunday, though we will periodically post deeper analysis beyond that date.
Currently hospitalized is under 50 per million people in 8 states, up from only 2 states in early February.
7-day average cases are down over 10% week over week in all US regions save the Northeast. However, testing in the Northeast is up much more than cases in the same period.
The COVID Tracking Project is ending data collection this Sunday. As part of our wind down process, we are for the first time publishing our full data annotations, a set of structured metadata on how states define their COVID-19 metrics. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…
Health data pipelines in the US are siloed, with each state running its own pipelines to collect data on COVID-19’s spread. In the absence of federal guidelines, and constrained by technical limitations of their systems, many of them use different data definitions.
Definitions are often relegated to small footnotes on state dashboards. But they make a big difference in the data: They can tip the scale between labeling a COVID-19 case as active versus recovered, or between counting or not counting some COVID-19 cases and deaths at all.
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.