Starting this week, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health will publish the COVID-19 Interactive Data Dashboard on a weekly basis rather than five days per week, to reflect the state’s evolving COVID-19 response.
“As the pandemic has continued to evolve, so too have our data needs,” said State Epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Brown. “The changes taking effect next week are part of our ongoing efforts to adapt to the pandemic and focus on the metrics most useful at a given time. The updated reporting reflects the current status of COVID-19 and its impact.”
Changes to the Interactive Data Dashboard include:
- Data will be uploaded to the interactive dashboard once per week on Thursdays
- Updated population denominators to more recent Census numbers going forward
- The Contact Tracing and Clusters tabs under COVID-19 Cases will be removed going forward; due to changes in case investigation and contact tracing practices, these data are no longer representative of the current situation
- Higher Education data information will be removed going forward, due to the decrease in surveillance testing being conducted in those settings
Changes to the Thursday Weekly COVID-19 Vaccination Report include:
- This report will now be published each Wednesday rather than Thursday, and the Doses Administered table (currently posted Monday through Friday) will be consolidated into the weekly vaccine dashboard
- County reporting data will include those fully vaccinated and those with at least one booster dose (currently includes those with at least 1 dose and those with at least one booster dose)
“While we all have become used to checking the numbers every day, monitoring trends over time is actually the most useful way to apply the COVID-19 data,” said Dr. Helen Boucher, Interim Dean of Tufts University School of Medicine, Chief Academic Officer at Tufts Medicine, and member of the Governor’s Medical Advisory Board. “Given that Massachusetts has one of the best vaccination and booster percentages in the nation, these changes make sense at this stage in our COVID-19 response.”
Last year, the interactive dashboard and vaccine report were updated from posting seven days per week to five days per week.
