Massachusetts on Monday unveiled its long-awaited interactive, searchable coronavirus dashboard, making the state’s thorough information on the pandemic more accessible to the public.
See the dashboard here.
The data Monday showed that the state has confirmed more than 375,000 COVID-19 cases 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 brought the death toll to 12,401.
Another probable death has also been reported, meaning 270 deaths are now as likely linked to COVID-19 in the state.
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The department said the percentage of coronavirus tests returned positive on average to 8.5%.
The number of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 increased again to 2339. Of those admitted to the hospital, 423 were listed according to the DPH.
Government Charlie Baker gives a detail on the distribution of vaccines for first responders in the mist.
The state is now in the midst of a surge in coronavirus cases, which is not necessarily fully reflected in the data, Baker said Monday.
“Due to the holidays, of course, there are some delays in reporting and fewer people are being tested. We expect this to catch up fairly quickly and give us a better idea of where the current trends are in the next few days,” he said. .
The new dashboard was loading when it started just before 5pm, but it apparently had problems with the server shortly thereafter. A comment that was added to the page later read: “Due to the large amount of internet traffic, some users have had difficulty accessing the current COVID-19 Dashboard. We are working quickly to address this issue and we expect to reload the dashboard soon. ”
The dashboard contains both textual and graphical overviews of various coronavirus statistics, including cases, deaths, tests, and hospitalizations, as well as several breakthroughs that provide more details on benchmarks.
Massachusetts Department of Health The trend sheet of the coronavirus dashboard in Massachusetts, as it appeared on its debut Monday, January 4, 2020.
The Department of Public Health is taking its “data to a new level by building an interactive and more user-friendly dashboard to review,” Government Representative Charlie Baker said at a news conference earlier Monday.
The dashboard will be built more in the future, Baker added.
The coronavirus data from the state has so far been available in a long PDF document that is available to download every day around 5pm. More data, such as the risk of coronavirus transmission through the city and how many vaccines have been administered in the state, are available in reports released weekly.
Other states have had digital dashboards for months, and the Massachusetts version has also been running for weeks.
Doctors are worried that the increased volume they are already seeing will only get worse if the rise starts to hit after Christmas.
This fall, several public health experts told NBC10 Boston that the state’s coronavirus data was particularly well presented. Dr Thomas Tsai, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who studies public health, policy and computer science, said it is more important than presenting the data accessible and interactive.
He noted that the state of Georgia has outsourced its dashboard, which looks nice but has questionable data – Atlanta Magazine calls it a disaster that damages the reputation of the Georgia Department of Public Health – and was a much worse alternative. for what Massachusetts provided.
“I actually think the Massachusetts dashboard has a very large amount of data that many other states do not have,” he said, citing the state’s previous dashboard equivalent to a Powerpoint presentation, which is “very useful for researchers. of public health and for response to public health. “