LIVE CORONA TRACKER FULL

“They don’t know how much data was missed, but they expect that once they’re able to account for it, they’ll be able to scoop it up from their spreadsheets and that will affect their positivity rate and understanding of the outbreak,” Kissane says. For instance, Florida’s testing rates dipped recently due to a hurricane, and California recently disclosed that their state IT system that collects reports from labs has not been catching all the test results the labs have sent. The COVID Tracking Project, Kissane says, works to be as thorough as possible in explaining the data, how they source it, and if and when they introduce errors into the process, and if there are errors present in the data they pull from.

LIVE CORONA TRACKER FULL

And because hospital systems all report their own data, it can be difficult to collect a full picture. Some states won’t count a death as COVID-related if the person did not have a laboratory-confirmed test.

The definition of a positive case can vary from one confirmed by a laboratory test to one that’s probable on the basis of symptoms and exposure. “If we hadn’t been that deep into the state-level data by that point, that error might not have been discovered for a long time,” she says.Įven though data on COVID-19 seems straightforward-a matter of collecting information on cases, deaths, and hospitalizations-it’s much more complicated than that. Those mismatches, Kissane says, were due in large part to the federal government conflating viral and antibody testing, which was later reported by the COVID Tracking Project’s cofounders in The Atlantic. The CDC has published data on confirmed cases, Kissane says, but when the COVID Tracking Project team compared their data from the states to what the CDC is reporting in May, they found substantial mismatches. has lagged behind on testing and data sharing. The COVID Tracking Project team notes that while many other countries have implemented widespread testing and data collection strategies to contain the virus, the U.S. Tableau talked to Kissane about why this effort is so important, how they get it done, and how this substantial data project has grown over time.ĬOVID-19 has shone a spotlight on the need for a centralized, accurate, and up-to-date data source to understand the virus and how it’s spreading. Since that time, the COVID Tracking Project has been building the most accurate record it can of data related to the coronavirus, and has amassed a large cohort of volunteers and an advisory board of public health experts to drive the work forward. “We expected we’d be updating the data for a few days–maybe a week-until the federal data emerged,” she told Tableau.

Absent any comprehensive data collection and sharing efforts from the federal government, the growing team was pulling numbers from wherever they could-state public health data tables, press conferences, Tweets, Facebook posts, and anywhere else data were shared.

They joined up on March 7 and made a call for volunteers to help source data, and that’s when Kissane joined as managing director. Separately, Jeff Hammerbacher, Founder and General Partner at Related Sciences, had built a tracking spreadsheet of his own. The effort launched organically in early March, after two journalists at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, built a tracker investigating lagging COVID-19 testing rates. Their data has been cited by the White House, the CDC, numerous state governments, and all across the media.īut when Tableau sat down to chat with Erin Kissane, the project’s managing editor, she said that initially, the team did not anticipate how long term-and vital-this project would become. In the U.S., it’s been over half a year since the virus materialized, and the work that the COVID Tracking Project is doing is essential for understanding its spread. They’ve also begun tracking COVID data by race and ethnicity-an effort that’s proved critical to understanding the disparate impacts of the virus. states and five territories, and visualize this data in Tableau. Every day, they publish the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from all 50 U.S. If you’ve been following the evolving data on the coronavirus in the U.S., you’re probably familiar with the COVID Tracking Project. The team behind the COVID Tracking Project did not expect to be here right now.

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