Thread by @NYCHealthCommr

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented interest in public health data. Early in the pandemic, we knew it was crucial to share data in useful ways. Our team recently published our strategy and approach to sharing data in @AJPH: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJ… 🧵

When @nycHealthy began publishing COVID-19 data webpages, we wanted to do so in ways that made the data accessible and useful to everyone — policymakers, journalists, researchers and all New Yorkers. Since April 2020, our data pages have been viewed over 20 million times.

We wanted our visualizations to be clear and easy to understand, so we used @Datawrapper to create interactive data visualizations we could easily embed into our pages. We optimized our visualizations to be accessible to people who use assistive technology to access the internet.

The more eyes on the data, the better. So, we published data as machine-readable CSV files, with extensive documentation, in a @Github repository. This means that anybody could download and use the data.
See it here: github.com/nychealth/coro…

Since we started doing this, NYC’s data have been used in over 140 academic papers that help us collectively understand the impacts and realities of the COVID-19 pandemic: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&…

As a public agency, and as holders of public knowledge, we believe strongly in the importance of sharing that knowledge in ways that most New Yorkers can access and understand. Take a look at the article for more details: ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJ…

Behind the scenes, it takes tremendous effort and coordination to collect, clean, and analyze the data. My thanks to the team at @nycHealthy and beyond for their commitment to this critical component of our #COVID19 response effort.

Explore the data: on.nyc.gov/covid19data