On Friday we published our latest guide, this one on federal race and ethnicity data. We explain where you can find it, and what you need to know about its limitations.
Our Federal Data 101 about race and ethnicity data is published.
Publicly available federal race and ethnicity COVID-19 data is currently usable and improving, although it shares many of the problems we’ve found in state-reported data.
Federal race and ethnicity COVID-19 data is not comprehensive enough to represent people’s experience of the pandemic in the United States. Most data is only available nationally, not by state.
The federal data can be better, by collecting and publishing race and ethnicity data more consistently and comprehensively, presenting the data in clear, accessible ways, and being transparent about data sources and contexts.
For many weeks now, the number of cases and hospitalizations has been going down across the country. Unfortunately, that trend has now reversed in the state of Michigan. Cases * and * hospitalizations are both on the rise there.
There had been some hopes that if we did see cases rise somewhere, hospitalizations would not follow because many vulnerable people have been vaccinated. But Michigan hospitalizations have increased 45% from their February low.
Two important pieces of context: Statewide, just 28% of Black residents 65+ are known to have received a first dose of vaccine. Though that data is incomplete, CDC numbers show that 66% of the U.S. population aged 65+ has received at least one dose of vaccine.
One major caveat—we are not committed to maintaining this script should the federal data pages undergo material changes. This is simply a set of instructions for interested data users (and an example of what's possible with federal data).
For inexperienced data users, this process is no more than 2 clicks. For users familiar with Python and pandas, feel free to take this code as a starting point for further exploration.
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.
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.