Federal COVID Data 101: What We Know About Race and Ethnicity Data
Publicly available federal race and ethnicity COVID-19 data is currently usable and improving, although it shares many of the problems we’ve found in state-reported data.
Giving Thanks and Looking Ahead: Our Data Collection Work Is Done
While our work to compile COVID-19 data has concluded, we will continue to share research, analysis, and documentation in the months ahead. We are enormously grateful to the hundreds of volunteers who made this work possible.
The State of COVID-19 Race and Ethnicity Data
We know COVID-19 is affecting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color the most. But we need more and more standardized data to truly understand the impact to these communities—and to mitigate those disparities.
State-Level Vaccine Demographic Data is Messy and Incomplete—We Need Federal Data, Now
Only a third of states and territories with public vaccine data share information on the race and ethnicity of vaccine recipients, and those that do share it do so in highly unstandardized ways. But data from the federal government could answer the question of who’s getting vaccinated.
How We Hope Vaccines Will Be Tracked
The federal government seems poised to provide high-quality data on vaccinations, but even a minimal dataset must answer key questions about who is getting vaccinated.
Ultralight Recommendations for a National Pandemic Dashboard
The announcement of a forthcoming national pandemic dashboard is heartening news for COVID-19 data folks all over the country. We have a few modest suggestions for the team that will undertake this work.
Introducing the COVID Tracking Project City Dataset
Our new data collection tracks the spread of COVID-19 in 65 cities and counties across the United States, and it lets us see how fatality rates vary widely across geographies.
COVID-19 Race and Ethnicity Data: What’s Changed, and What Still Needs Improvement
Even with significant data unreported, the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color is clear.
Better COVID-19 Data Is Coming By August 1—But Will the Public See It?
Starting in August, new federal rules will require testing labs to report better data on the spread of COVID-19 in the United States. What happens to this new information is up to state and local officials. Journalists, open-data advocates, and members of the public can help us hold governments accountable for collecting and publishing this urgently needed data.
Why Changing COVID-19 Demographics in the US Make Death Trends Harder to Understand
COVID-19 death data lags behind testing data in ways we mostly understand. What we only partly understand is how an infection rate that seems to be skewing younger will affect the death toll in surging regional outbreaks.
Early COVID-19 Race Data Shows Disproportionate Loss of Black Lives—It's Time for States to Release the Rest of the Data
We're still missing vital race and ethnicity data, but where the data is strongest—official COVID-19 death rates—the toll of longstanding public health inequities within Black communities is painfully clear. Five months into the US outbreak, several states are still not collecting or releasing complete demographic data required to address these disparities and safely re-open state economies. It's time for this to change.