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The COVID Tracking Project

@COVID19Tracking

1 Apr

Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed that newsrooms of all sizes—and even some government agencies—have fallen into some of the data potholes that we’ve become familiar with in our year of wrangling public COVID-19 data.

So today, we’re offering a brief cheat sheet on avoiding some of the most common errors we’ve seen. covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…

Tip 1: If you see dramatic movement in the data, look for contextual clues before interpreting it as a change in the pandemic. Day-of-week effects in data arranged by date of report produce predictable reporting swings over the course of each week.

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The COVID Tracking Project

@COVID19Tracking

22 Mar

While we’ve stopped our data collection, we’ve put together a group of guides to help you navigate and understand federal COVID data.

covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…

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.

covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…

You can find guides to federal COVID testing, case, death, hospitalization and nursing home data here.

covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…

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The COVID Tracking Project

@COVID19Tracking

19 Mar

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.

covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…

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.

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The COVID Tracking Project

@COVID19Tracking

19 Mar

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.

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

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.

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The COVID Tracking Project

@COVID19Tracking

15 Mar

Here's the latest in our ongoing effort to help data users find, understand, and use federal COVID-19 data.

We've created a bit of code that combines federal testing, case, death, and hospitalization data in a single spreadsheet.

covidtracking.com/analysis-updat…

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.

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