Massachusetts unveiled its long-awaited interactive and searchable coronavirus panel on Monday, making some of the state’s complete pandemic data more accessible to the public.
See the panel here.
Monday’s data showed that the state 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.
Another probable death has also been reported, which means that 270 deaths are now considered likely to be linked to COVID-19 in the state.
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The percentage of positive coronavirus tests, on average, rose to 8.5%, the department said.
The number of patients admitted to COVID-19 increased again, to 2,339. Of those admitted, 423 were listed as in intensive care units and 258 are intubated, according to the DPH.
Governor Charlie Baker details the distribution of the vaccine to early respondents in Massachusetts.
The state is now in the midst of a post-holiday increase in coronavirus cases, which is not necessarily reflected in the data, Baker said on Monday.
“Obviously, due to the holidays, there are some reporting delays and fewer people taking the test. We hope this happens very quickly and gives us a better picture of where our current trends are in the coming days,” he said.
The new panel was loading when it launched just before 5 pm, but it seemed to be having problems with the server soon after. A note added to the page later was: “Due to the high volume of web traffic, some users have had difficulty accessing today’s COVID-19 Panel. We are working quickly to resolve this issue and hope to post the panel again soon.”
The dashboard includes text and graphic overviews of various coronavirus metrics, including cases, deaths, tests and hospitalizations, as well as various intervals that provide more details on the metrics.
Massachusetts Department of Health The Massachusetts coronavirus panel trend guide as it appeared in its debut on Monday, January 4, 2020.
The Department of Public Health is taking its “data to a new level, creating an interactive and more user-friendly panel to review it,” Governor Charlie Baker said at a news conference on Monday.
The panel will be further developed in the future, Baker added.
The state’s coronavirus data is so far available in a long .pdf document available for download around 5pm every day. More data, such as the risk of coronavirus transmission from city to city and how many vaccines have been administered in the state, are available in reports released weekly.
Other states have had digital billboards for months, and the Massachusetts version has also been under construction for weeks.
Doctors fear that the increase in volume they are already seeing will only get worse when the post-Christmas peak begins to hit.
This fall, several public health experts told NBC10 Boston that the state’s coronavirus data was presented in an especially thorough manner. Dr. Thomas Tsai, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who studies public health, politics and data science, said this is more important than presenting the data in an accessible and interactive way.
He noted that the state of Georgia had outsourced its panel, which looked good but displayed questionable data – Atlanta Magazine called it a disaster that damaged the reputation of the Georgia Department of Public Health – and was a much worse alternative to what Massachusetts provided.
“In fact, I think the Massachusetts panel has a wealth of data that many other states don’t,” he said, calling the state’s previous panel a PowerPoint presentation that is “very useful for public health researchers and for public health response. “