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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.

By Alice GoldfarbMarch 19, 2021

Why Some States Won’t Share Race and Ethnicity Data on Vaccinations with the CDC—and Why That’s a Problem

We sent requests for data-use agreements to 56 states and territories to learn what vaccination data was being shared with the federal government. We found that several states—including California and Texas—aren’t sharing race and ethnicity data on vaccinations with the CDC, citing patient privacy laws. In better news, most states are.

By Caitlin Antonios, Mohar Chatterjee, Georgia Gee, Derek Kravitz, & Kyra SeneseFebruary 16, 2021

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.

By Alice GoldfarbJanuary 29, 2021

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.

By Alice Goldfarb & Kara W. SchechtmanJanuary 15, 2021

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.

By Alexis Madrigal & Kara W. SchechtmanDecember 22, 2020

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.

By Nicki Camberg, Artis Curiskis, Kara Oehler, Judith Oppenheim, Catherine Pollack, Aarushi Sahejpal, & Sharon WangNovember 10, 2020

State-level data obscures important variations in how cities and counties experience COVID-19

We track and analyze data from cities and counties, including breakdowns by race, ethnicity, and ZIP code when possible. The differences we find between cities, counties, and states give useful insights into response efforts.

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.

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.

Tracking Race and Ethnicity in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic isn't affecting all communities the same way. That's why we're partnering with American University’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center to launch a new project: the COVID Racial Data Tracker.

By Alexis MadrigalApril 15, 2020