New: The Inside Medicine Covid-19 metrics dashboard. Finally: key Covid-19 metrics in one place.
Our new dashboard features easy-to-use up-to-date state and county data to help you track where things stand.
It’s getting harder to follow Covid-19 trends.
Fortunately, for most people, Covid metrics no longer carry life-and-death implications. But just about everyone has some reason to be interested in these data, whether occasionally or often. Maybe you’re immunocompromised and the stakes are very high. Maybe you live with or plan to visit someone who is at high risk. Maybe your personal risk tolerance is low because of some other underlying medical problem or concern. Or maybe you just have some important event coming up and you don’t want to miss it because you happen to get sick right beforehand.
For people wanting to stay apprised of Covid data, the data are still out there. But increasingly, they can be a little hard to find and difficult to wrangle.
So, Inside Medicine data guru Benjy Renton and I decided to do something about this for you.
We put together a one-stop shop dashboard for Covid-19 metrics that you can check at any time for thousands of US jurisdictions. We have wastewater levels (which has become the best metric for tracking virus levels), hospitalization rates and capacities, intensive care unit census data, death rates, and some testing data (nationally).
All of the data we’ll be sharing are indeed available elsewhere. But our goal is to collate, curate, and clean up (i.e. make readable and coherent) the numbers from CDC and HHS datasets so that you can quickly find them all in one place, and use and interpret them with ease. The graphs will update automatically (daily or every few days for some metrics, weekly for others). You’ll be able to find data on your state and your county, empowering you to make whatever choices you need to make, wherever you are, or wherever you might be going.
Also, we plan on writing up some “dashboard summaries” (perhaps every week or two, depending on what we’re seeing in the data), to keep you informed as we head into respiratory virus season in the coming months. Let us know if there’s something you’d like to see included on the dashboard, or if something there needs a better explanation. Note: we are still refining some things, but we are launching now.
Here’s the link to the brand new Inside Medicine Covid-19 metrics dashboard!
Please note that the default dashboard loads to the State module. You can find your state in the drop-down menu on the upper right (see the blue arrow below). To access the County dashboard, click “Counties” on the right-hand side (see the red arrow and oval below).
Once you are in the County dashboard, you can type in the specific county you’re looking for in the search tab on the upper right (click on the County field, see green arrow below).
Aside: You’ll notice that there are a lot of counties that have the word “Jefferson” in them. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!
Lastly, this service of Inside Medicine will always be absolutely free. But setting this up took some back-end work and there’s sure to be upkeep, as we refine the tools. So, if this is valuable to you, please support this project if you’re in the position to do so. Just as importantly, please share this newsletter to help keep your community informed. Thanks!
Data sources:
States:
Hospitalizations: https://healthdata.gov/Hospital/COVID-19-Reported-Patient-Impact-and-Hospital-Capa/g62h-syeh
Deaths: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-death-counts-rates-and-percen/mpx5-t7tu
Wastewater: https://data.cdc.gov/Public-Health-Surveillance/NWSS-Public-SARS-CoV-2-Wastewater-Metric-Data/2ew6-ywp6
Cases: https://data.cdc.gov/Case-Surveillance/Weekly-United-States-COVID-19-Cases-and-Deaths-by-/pwn4-m3yp
Counties:
Hospitalizations: https://data.cdc.gov/Public-Health-Surveillance/Weekly-United-States-COVID-19-Hospitalization-Metr/akn2-qxic (since May 2023) and https://data.cdc.gov/Public-Health-Surveillance/United-States-COVID-19-Community-Levels-by-County/3nnm-4jni (before May 2023)
Wastewater: https://data.cdc.gov/Public-Health-Surveillance/NWSS-Public-SARS-CoV-2-Wastewater-Metric-Data/2ew6-ywp6
Super appreciated! It has been harder and harder to get a sense of what’s actually happening in real time, so this is fantastic.
Very cool - a few questions:
1) Is the data for total beds actual, estimates, or reported?
2) I was under the impression the US trends to have ~970K beds, which why I was surprised the data goes as high as 821K and as low as 690K - would be interested in an essay to explain the nuts and bolts behind why there are so few staffed beds, how and why that number has steadily decreased over the last 50 years (IIRC we had ~2 milllion beds in the 70's with a smaller population) - I have a good idea of the reasons (efficiency, better triage, more support sites to delegate) but would enjoy a deep dive at some point.
3) May be good to have another version of the first chart which just breaks out the ICU information since the lines are scaled against the total beds so harder to see trends (the "Keep Only" and "exclude" options weren't changing the chart for me)
4) A repeat of the "Deaths" graph would be useful with total death stacked against Covid Deaths
5) Maybe it's there and I didn't see it, but is there a way to see the source data links?
6) Can you give an explainer on what the wastewater data actually shows us? What does "sum of percentile of Maximum" mean? Is 100% of all wastewater across the country sampled? What can this data tell us?
Great work