Massachusetts on Monday unveiled its long-awaited interactive dashboard and coronavirus search, making some of the state’s most comprehensive data on the pandemic more accessible to the public.
See the board here.
Data on Monday showed that the state has confirmed more than 375,000 cases of COVID-19 during the course of the pandemic. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health confirmed 4,358 new cases of the virus, bringing the total to 375,455, and an additional 60 deaths raised the death toll to 12,401.
A probable death was also reported, meaning that 270 deaths are now considered likely to be COVID-19 related in the state.
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The percentage of coronavirus tests that returned positive, on average, has risen to 8.5%, the department said.
The number of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 has increased again, to 2,339. Of those hospitalized, 423 were in intensive care units and 258 are intubated, according to the DPH.
Gov. Charlie Baker details the distribution of vaccines for first-time attendants at Mass.
The state is now in the midst of an increase in coronavirus cases after the holidays, which is not necessarily fully reflected in the data, Baker said Monday.
“Obviously, due to the holidays, there are some lags in reporting and there are fewer people taking the test. We hope it will be updated fairly quickly and give us a better picture of the current position of our trends in the coming days, ”he said. .
The new board was loading when it debuted just before 5pm, but it looked like it was having issues with the server shortly after. A note added to the page later said: “Due to the high volumes of web traffic, some users have had difficulty accessing today’s COVID-19 dashboard. We are working quickly to resolve this issue and look forward to re-posting the dashboard. soon “.
The dashboard includes text and graphical overviews of various coronavirus metrics, including cases, deaths, trials, and hospitalizations, as well as various breakdowns that provide more details about the metrics.
Massachusetts Department of Health The Massachusetts Coronavirus Dashboard Trends Tab, as it debuted on Monday, January 4, 2020.
The Department of Public Health is taking its data “to a new level by creating an interactive, easier-to-use dashboard for reviewing,” Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday earlier in a briefing.
Baker will add that the board will be built more in the future.
State coronavirus data so far have been available in a long .pdf document available for download every day around 5 p.m. More data are available in weekly reports, such as the risk of coronavirus transmission city by city and how many vaccines have been administered in the state.
Other states have had digital dashboards for months and the Massachusetts version also works for weeks.
Doctors worry that the volume increase they already see will only get worse when the Christmas rise begins to play out.
This fall, several public health experts told NBC10 Boston that coronavirus status data has been presented in a special way. Dr. Thomas Tsai, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health TH Chan, who studies public health, policy, and data science, said it is more important than presenting data in a accessible and interactive.
He noted that the state of Georgia hired its dashboard, which seemed nice, but showed questionable data – Atlanta magazine called it a disaster that damaged the reputation of the Georgia Department of Public Health – and was an alternative. much worse than what Massachusetts has provided.
“In fact, I think the Massachusetts dashboard has a lot of data that a lot of other states don’t have,” he said, describing the previous state dashboard as the equivalent of a Powerpoint presentation that is “very useful for to public health researchers and for public health response “.