>> Hi everyone.
My name is Jade Fulce, and I'm a public affairs specialist for CDC.
On behalf of the Office of the Associate Director for Communication
and the COVID-19 Emergency Response,
thank you for attending our first media demo highlighting the COVID data tracker.
We have allotted 30 minutes for this demo with question and answer session at the end.
But you can submit questions at any time in the Zoom question and answer box.
All participants are muted.
Today, we are focusing on the CDC COVID data tracker and its features,
but if you have any questions outside this topic, please send us an email at media@CDC.gov.
There's a brief survey at the end of this webinar
so you can let us know is this session was useful.
This demo is being recorded, and thanks again for attending.
Now I'll turn it over to Fleetwood Loustalot, senior advisor for the COVID data tracker.
>> Great, thanks Jade.
First, I do want to acknowledge that this pandemic has had a terrible
and devastating effect on American families and on our communities.
CDC understands this and is committed to leading with science to help in this pandemic.
We do appreciate the opportunity to provide you with a demo
on a few sections we think you'll find particularly useful.
Before we get to the demo, I wanted to give a bit of context.
Data plays a critical role in the COVID-19 response.
The COVID data tracker gives the public access to much of the same data
that are used to guide the response.
Our goal for this presentation is to introduce you to the COVID data tracker,
the types of data you can find there and how to navigate the tool.
The CDC's COVID data tracker combines county, state, national and global data
from across the response in a series of interactive dashboards.
Today, during the demonstration, we will be highlighting the pieces we believe you
and your audiences will find most helpful.
The county data, what's going on in your backyard, vaccination data,
and trends by population visualization.
Next slide, please.
Thank you.
The COVID data tracker has evolved, as it has evolved, we have tried to make
as much data available as quickly as possible, and we will continue to expand.
We used these data to support the development of recommendations and view the transparency
in displaying critical data as a reflection of our leadership in this pandemic
and service to the American people.
As you see on this slide, there are a variety of data available on the COVID data tracker.
New tabs displaying different types of COVID-19-related data are generally added
on Thursday afternoons, and data are updated daily.
We also have a variety of communication products, including B-roll, stills,
social media graphics and a video with new things added every week.
These products and more are available
on the CDC's COVID-19 website in an easy to use toolkit.
We'll share the link in the chat box.
In addition, a COVID data tracker weekly review is also in development.
The review will summarize recent trends and key metrics from the response.
If you're interested in signing up to receive notification when the weekly review is released,
we will also add the link in the chat box.
Now I'm happy to turn it over to the data tracker's project manager, Tess Palmer,
for a brief demo of what's available on the site.
Tess.
>> Thank you, Fleetwood.
All right.
The COVID data tracker updates daily with the most accurate
and complete information available sourced from states, partners and other federal entities.
Since its launch in April of 2020, CDC's COVID data tracker has had more than 150 million views
by the American people and from around the world.
These critical data inform public health action to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and save lives.
So I'm going to give you a brief overview of some things
that you can find in COVID data tracker.
And I'd like to start by showing you our landing page.
So as the landing page sounds, this is the first page that you'll come
to when you come to COVID data tracker.
And I want to point out a couple key features of this landing page.
First of all, you'll see that numbers across the top in this statistics bar give you a quick
at a glance view of the most important kind
of high level numbers concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can see total cases in the US, how cases have been trending over the last 30 days,
total vaccines administered in the US, total deaths in the US
and how deaths have been trending in the last 30 days.
Scrolling down on the landing page, you'll also notice that there's this recent updates section.
And we'll be updating the bullets here every week, because as Fleetwood mentioned,
we are continuously updating COVID data tracker and adding new tabs of information
and new metrics and new functionality.
So we want you to be able to see right here at a glance what's new in COVID data tracker.
Scrolling down a little bit more on the landing page, you'll see that we've taken all
of the data available in COVID data tracker and curated these groupings
by topic or by realm of information.
So first, we have the your community grouping where you can find county-level data,
forecasting data showing observed cases and death and also modeled cases and deaths.
Data on vaccinations in the US and by state and territory and federal entity
and many other interesting pieces that refer to your community
and help you understand the situation in your community.
Scrolling down a bit more on the landing page we have the cases
and deaths trends by location and demographics.
Here you can see the cases and deaths by state, see the overall case and death numbers,
the rates of cases and deaths and zoom in on each state to see each state's specific metrics.
We have the US and state trends so you can see how cases and deaths are trending over time.
We have cases and deaths by demographic characteristics, global cases and deaths,
the compared state trends tool and also there's cases and deaths by urban rural status
and social factors, which is one of the ones I'll dig
into a little bit deeper here in a moment.
Scrolling down further on the landing page, we have vaccinations in long term care facilities,
cases and deaths among healthcare personnel and also emergency department visits.
You can see how emergency department visits are trending in your state.
Next, we have information on laboratory testing and seroprevalence.
Laboratory testing at the state and national level, at the county level and then also results
of recent seroprevalence surveys that CDC has conducted so you can understand the estimates
of antibodies to SARS CoV-2 in your state.
And then last we have a section for people who are at increased risk giving us information
on underlying medical conditions, so the prevalence of certain conditions
at the county level that might place people at higher risk of COVID-19.
We have pregnant women, so you can see data on the severity of COVID-19 during pregnancy.
And also correctional facilities, you can see cases and deaths in US correction
and detention facilities by state.
Another piece of this landing page that I'd like to point out is this left side navigation
that again groups the different data tabs available here for you,
so you can click on one, and you'll be taken to that tab.
But the left side navigation will always be there for you
so you can see the options available.
So next I'd like to look at the vaccination tab.
So I can get there simply by clicking at the top or clicking in the left side navigation.
And you'll see that we have information on COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States,
both doses distributed or delivered, doses administered and then breaking
down the doses administered by whether it was the first dose or the second dose.
And you can see those same numbers displayed in the map below.
And you can update what metric you'd like to see in the map.
So if you'd like to see people who have received one or more doses as a count,
you can make those selections here and then look at the map
and see how those numbers look state by state.
And by hovering over a state, you can get all of that state's metrics.
Scrolling down I also want to point out that at the bottom
of every tab you'll find a data table and a data download available.
So moving on, I would like to show you our county view tab.
So again, I can go to the your community section here,
or I can go back to the landing page and click on county view.
It's a very large dataset, so it takes a second to load.
And here on the county view tab you're first presented
with a map of the US at the county level.
And you can update that map of the US based on what you would like to see.
And then you can zoom in on a particular state and county.
I will take a look at Jackson County, Missouri, because that is where I am from.
And then once this loads, we'll be able to see the entire state of Missouri
with each county colored in based on your selections up here.
And then scrolling down we can see both seven day averages and these trend lines
and seven day totals, for cases, for deaths, for testing percent positivity, testing volume,
new hospital admissions for COVID-19 patients, the percent of beds used by COVID-19 patients
and the percent of ICU beds used by COVID-19 patients.
And if you'd like to see these trend lines in a different time window,
you can simply use the time slider at the top,
and all of the graphs will update based on the time window you selected.
You can also see here that we have community characteristics about the county
that you selected, so you can see the population density, the average household size,
the percent uninsured and specifically the social vulnerability index ranking
of that county and the COVID-19 community availability index ranking for that county.
Another tab that I would like to show you is here in the demographic trend section,
and it's cases and deaths by urban rural status and socioeconomic variables.
So this tab lets you look at the West or a specific state or specific Health
and Human Services region or HHS region.
And then you can decide if you'd like to look at case trends,
either 7 or 14 day averages or accumulative or death trends.
But the very interesting thing about this tab is you're able to look at those case
and death trends, stratified or separated out into different categories
of these socioeconomic variables.
So what you're seeing right now are case trends in the US separated
between metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties.
And we also add in a line that's not separated out.
It shows the US total line.
And you can always remove that if you'd like to just see the difference
between metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties.
Looking at the other options here about how to separate out or categorize or stratify the case
in death trends, you can see here that there are other options.
You can stratify by the percent of the population that's 65 and older.
The percent of the population in different racial ethnic groups as you can see listed here.
The percent of the population in poverty, population uninsured, average household size,
and again, the COVID-19 vulnerability index and the social vulnerability index.
So I think that is all we are going to go into today on COVID data tracker,
but I want to just point out that there are many other tabs of information available
for you including the state profile report, which is created by Health and Human Services
and gives you a weekly snapshot in time focusing on key COVID-19 metrics.
And you can click here to download that.
You can also similarly download a daily snapshot in time at the state and county level
with the community profile report also linked here.
And one last thing, because I want to show you so much, that I'd like to point out is
that we have vaccination trend data available as well.
So you can look how vaccination administration is trending over time at the US level
or in specifically federal long term care facilities.
And you can look at those trends as total doses administered, as people receiving one
or more doses or two doses, and you can look at the cumulative numbers or the daily count.
So with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen, and we can begin the question
and answer part of our demo today.
For questions, please place them in the Q and A, and I see some of them are down there now,
so I will open the Q and A, and Fleetwood and I will start trying to answer these questions.
All right so the first question is where do county level data come from?
Well, we both know this answer.
Fleetwood, would you like to start off, because I've been talking for a while?
>> Yeah, sure, happy to.
So the county level data comes from a method used, it's called web scraping.
And so we pull data from state and local jurisdictions into a dataset.
We use methods to help assure the data are accurate.
And then we utilize those data as the dataset to publish, present data for the county view tab.
The only county view tab, you will notice
that there are some disclaimers and notes on there as well.
The primary note I would say is that, you know, it takes a while to get information in.
So to scrape the data to pull it in, to make sure it's quality controlled and checked
and then to report it on the website.
And so if, one of the notations is is that there may also be data available at the local level
from a local health department or a state health department.
And so a secondary check from a state or local health department website could be done as well
to confirm the data that are available.
The data for us on the county view tab are there for comparison of jurisdictions,
and also we recognize that many counties don't have the capacity to report some of these data.
And so we see it as one of our areas of service
where we can report these types of data at that local level.
So I'll stop there.
I could talk a while.
Tess and I love data, and we could talk about it all afternoon.
So we can move on to the next one.
>> Thank you, Fleetwood.
The next question is can you determine cases by lab method?
What is used to define cases in the state or county?
So that's a great question.
First of all, I'll answer this in two parts.
So first of all, to specifically call out the lab method, I want to be clear
that the testing results displayed on COVID data tracker, both at the national and state level
and at the county level, are results of RTPCR laboratory testing.
Second of all, how do we define cases?
Linked at the bottom of the cases and deaths by state tab
in our footnote is the case definition.
So you can read the case definition, which is used by our reporting states
and jurisdictions and territories to define cases.
That is a great note that at the bottom of each tab
on COVID data tracker you can find extensive footnotes that explain data sources,
data limitations, any other information about maybe how metrics are calculated.
Everything that will help you correctly interpret the data that you're looking at.
All right so the next question is what is the benefit
of using COVID data tracker instead of other sources of data?
And I think we can just go back and forth, Fleetwood.
Would you like to take that one?
>> Absolutely, yes.
So we believe that these data are the most current accurate
and available for the American public.
And CDC's efforts in collecting these data and leveraging the partnerships that we have
across our state and local jurisdictional partners helps to ensure
that these data are there and available to inform the public, to guide recommendations
and to assure the public that what we are doing is being tracked and can make a difference.
And I will say that the COVID data tracker as well has vaccination data on the website.
And it's one of the few places that you have publicly available vaccination data
that are there.
And we do regularly update the data daily for the vaccination data across,
and numerous other datasets across the platform as well.
>> Great. Thank you, Fleetwood.
The next question is surrounding race and ethnicity data.
So the COVID-19 pandemic has put a heavy strain
on public health resources that supply the data to us.
Right now, 51% of case data and 77% of death data have race and ethnicity information.
In many states, the large number of COVID-19 cases has severely strained the ability
of hospitals, healthcare providers and laboratories to report cases
with complete demographic information.
But we are working with states to gather more information on race,
ethnicity for reported cases, and the percentage of reported cases
that include race ethnicity in those data are increasing.
CDC is currently exploring other hospital datasets that contain race and ethnicity data
to better understand the COVID-19 health outcomes by race and ethnicity.
Okay. The next question is does the CDC plan to release vaccination data
for long term care facilities down to the facility level?
Also, vaccination data, also, are we planning to break vaccination down by demographics
and urban rural status and socioeconomic variables?
Do you want to take long term care, and then I can pick up with demographics?
>> Yes. Yep, so we have currently three tabs on vaccination data that are on the data tracker.
So an overall tab that highlights vaccinations that have been distributed to the jurisdictions
and that have been administered with the first dose and the second dose.
The second tab that was just released on Tuesday is trends in vaccinations over time.
And then the third tab that's available is vaccinations and long term care
through a federal pharmacy partnership program.
And at this time, the data are being presented on those three tabs, but we're regularly working
with our vaccine task force at CDC to work on new metrics for presentation,
and that's one thing that we may consider.
I'll pass to you for the demographics as well, Tess.
>> Thanks, Fleetwood.
So the second part of the question was whether we're going to report vaccination
by different demographic characteristics.
That is a great question and is something that we're actively working on
and will be released to COVID data tracker very soon.
This will include vaccinations by dose one or dose two,
broken down by racial ethnic groups, by age and by sex.
So that will be presented and available very soon on COVID data tracker.
I imagine once we've released those three demographic characteristics about those
who have been vaccinated, we will definitely want to look
at adding other demographic characteristics that we can kind
of analyze the vaccination, you know, distribution by.
So, great idea to also stratify those by urban rural status
and other socioeconomic variables, and we will keep that in mind.
All right, the next question is what additional data are you going to add in the future?
Fleetwood, I'll start us off, and you can add anything I'm forgetting, because there is a lot
that we are working on adding in the future.
And I think between the two of us we can remember all of it.
So we are working on adding additional hospital data.
We are working on adding, of course,
the vaccination demographics data, which I just mentioned.
We are working on adding some further information in addition to what's available
on CDC.gov about variant strain identification.
Fleetwood, what am I missing?
We've got a long list.
>> Yeah, there's others that are related to pregnancy,
so birth and infant, that we're looking at as well.
We have pregnancy data currently on the tracker, but we're looking to expand that.
And then other risk assessments at the community level as well.
So we do have a long list of additions and are looking forward
to continue to enhance and expand the site.
>> Great, thank you, Fleetwood.
So next question.
How can you be sure the information you receive from states and hospitals is accurate?
So first I'll say that CDC's overall COVID-19 case and death numbers are validated
through a confirmation process with each jurisdiction.
And the COVID-19 case and death numbers reported on other websites may differ
from what's posted on COVID data tracker.
But what is posted on COVID data tracker is what is, is precisely what is reported to us
from states and territories and other jurisdictions.
And the hospital part.
So hospital data are reported to the US Department of Health and Human Services,
also known as HHS, either directly from facilities or through a state submission.
And CDC's overall, so CDC receives those numbers directly
from HHS via the facilities and state submission.
So I think the next question is why would we use COVID data tracker instead
of other sources of data?
Fleetwood, would you like to take that one?
>> I would.
I would, yes, absolutely.
So the overall informational and CDC's COVID-19 data tracker
or COVID data tracker comes directly from what is submitted by our state and local partners,
as Tess has previously mentioned.
And it is continually updated.
So the assurity [phonetic] of the data being the most recent data are there.
And it does include a wide variety of data like case and death numbers and lab testing
and others that are submitted directly to us.
And we also offer the options of assessing information on trends and forecasting,
which may vary across different websites.
But that may be unique and novel to the data tracker that we have as options
of not only assessing what's going on now but what's going to happen in the near future.
And much of these data can be displayed as colored graphs or maps that can be snipped
or taken and utilized across a number of different platforms.
They can be used for news articles or other things as well as we recognize that a picture
or a figure or a photo many times can help convey a message a lot better
than a bullet point or a summary statement.
>> Thank you, Fleetwood.
And the last two questions that I have are concerning county level data.
First, where do our county data come from?
And county level data come from multiple places.
COVID-19 case and death metrics come from state
and local health departments, and CDC manages that dataset.
State or jurisdictional health departments submit testing data via the COVID-19 electronic
laboratory reporting.
Data also come from a combination of commercial public health and hospital laboratory reports.
The US Department of Health and Human Services, again, receives hospital data daily
from facilities or from state submissions, and this is coming from more
than 6,000 facilities across the country.
And every day we review data against local government websites, state websites
and news sources to ensure we have quality data.
And we will correct raw values as needed to make sure
that we're properly reflecting local government reports.
And the follow up question to that is how easily downloadable are these county level data?
And this is something we are working very hard to make available on COVID data tracker.
As you saw in our county view tab, we have a lot of county level data available and visualized
on the county view tab including cases and deaths and testing positivity in testing volume
and hospitalizations and community characteristics.
Those data are not yet downloadable from the county view tab,
but we hope to make that available very soon.
All right so we have gotten through all of our questions.
So I will hand it back to you, Fleetwood, I think to close us out.
>> Great, thanks Tess.
Thank you to everybody that submitted questions today
and that listened in to the overall demonstration.
We hope this was useful for you.
If you do have questions that we weren't able to address today,
please reach out to media@cdc.gov.
They're able to navigate those questions to the right individuals to help with the responses.
I think overall CDC has responded to over 800,000 inquiries across its CDC info platform.
So we're regularly providing responses and want to engage with you to get the best information
and the most current information out to you and your constituents
and those who you're communicating to.
So thank you so much for joining us today for this demonstration
and overview of the CDC's COVID data tracker.
We hope you visit the site.
We hope you utilize it, and please as well as sign
up for the data tracker's weekly review that will be coming out shortly.
So thank you so much for the time today.