Florida corona tracker3/27/2023 They'd scrutinize each of the numbers they were getting ready to make publicly available. But any good team of epidemiologists would likely be waking up early in the morning to pore over each data report. I know, because people are surprised to hear that I spent at least two hours every day on my own dashboard, even after I had automated many of the data extraction and data cleaning and the upload tasks. I imagine a lot of people think it's ultimately down to just, you know, the press of a few buttons and this automated process begins behind the scenes and pushes out all of that information that we got from Florida. So why might be your hunch as to why the Department of Health made this change in its public reporting? And to me, seven or 14-day trends would work just fine. So I think the underlying trends are what's most valuable. They're only counted once now in a weekly report.Īnd so I think hanging on to each day's positivity report, it's just not a good idea, especially in small counties that may be impacted by reporting lags and a resultant daily variability in the numbers. And why I like that is, it removes the effect of people being tested, let's say, for their jobs, who are likely to test negative multiple times within that week. And what I liked about this weekly report is it only counted each person tested during that week one time. So if you still have a yearning for daily numbers, there is a place to go get it for virtually every state in the United States at a decent level of granularity.Ĭan you expand on why seven-day or 14-day averages help the average person understand how Florida is doing?įor some time now, I had been focusing on a weekly report from the Department of Health made available as a county level electronic spreadsheet that tracked positivity. The other really important thing that comes to my mind is if you really still wanted to track the numbers daily in Florida, the CDC's COVID Data Tracker has, in my opinion, really upped its game in terms of the comprehensiveness and granularity, the information they provide. So the weekly reports should do about the same thing. The underlying trend is what really tells us what's going on and takes out some of the noise in the daily ebb and flow in reporting. So I think that's why for almost every measure, most epidemiologists monitor the seven-day or the 14-day rolling average, whether it's cases, positivity, hospitalizations, deaths, vaccination, you name it. And so it wasn't uncommon during this pandemic to see an unusually low number of cases reported one day, followed by a huge number the next day, and we end up getting overly excited about both of those numbers when a simple average of the two might actually have been no different than other numbers that were reported recently. Again, just one example of how daily versus less frequent reports are valuable.īut in all honesty, I believe we've paid way too much attention to the daily ebb and flow of the numbers, especially when we're speaking about metrics like COVID-19 deaths that are impacted by lags in reporting. That is, how many new infections can we expect from a single person who's been infected? We track that over time as one indicator of how the pandemic is progressing well, to estimate that it's certainly easier to do it reliably when one has access to data that are provided more frequently. A good example is the effective reproductive number of the virus. SALEMI: Daily reports are absolutely valuable. WLRN: What role do daily weekly reports have in epidemiology? What are we missing out on with this transition to weekly reports that you would need to keep your dashboard updated as you've had it before the switch? Salemi spoke with WLRN’s Verónica Zaragovia about the changes.īelow is an excerpt of their conversation which has been edited for length and clarity. Jason Salemi, a professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida's college of public health, used those reports to create his own daily COVID-19 dashboard, and he's now scaling it down, based on what's available from the health department. Our journalists are continuing to work hard to keep you informed across South Florida. WLRN is here for you, even when life is unpredictable. "As vaccinations increase and new case positivity rate decreases, the weekly report includes identified key data." "This decision was made as Florida transitions into the next phase of the COVID-19 response," wrote Weesam Khoury, the Department of Health's communications director, in an email to WLRN. Reports on cases at long-term care facilities, correctional facilities and schools are also gone from the department's website. Throughout the pandemic, Florida’s Department of Health put out daily COVID-19 reports with data including new cases and positivity rates.
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