For months, we have been collecting COVID-19 data, scrutinizing publicly available data definitions, and engaging in frequent conversations with jurisdictions to understand the data they share.
During this process, we have focused on three aspects of COVID-19 data reporting: 1) how the state defines and reports key metrics, such as testing data, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, 2) how the state presents information about COVID-19 in long-term-care facilities, and 3) how the state reports race and ethnicity data.
Our assessment below reflects both the thoroughness of New York’s reporting and the completeness and clarity of their data descriptions. We hope this work will not only help our data users to better grasp the limitations of these numbers but also might help health officials to understand the differences in data reporting across jurisdictions.
We require data definitions to be accessible from a state’s data pages and presented in a location where it is clear they will be maintained. Examples include data definition documents, data FAQs, dashboard footnotes, or definitions appearing daily in press releases.
Last updated March 2, 2021
State-level metrics
Some issues exist:
- does not have a clear full definition of cases
- does not provide a breakdown of confirmed and probable cases
- does not publish what test types are included in their main testing metric
- does not provide a testing metric clearly including only viral RNA tests
- does not regularly provide antigen total test counts
- does not regularly provide antigen positive test counts
- does not regularly provide total tests in terms of unique people tested
- does not regularly provide a cumulative number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19
- data for multiple key metrics is hard to discover or access
Race and Ethnicity
Serious issues exist:
- does not report race / ethnicity data for cases and tests
- does not report deaths for: Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, and American Indians or Alaska Natives
- reports race data for 87% of deaths
Long-Term Care
Some issues exist:
- does not provide information about facilities with open and closed outbreaks, or date of last case
- does not provice facilities data in a downloadable or machine readable form
- does not provide either staff or resident cumulative cases by facility
- does not break out staff cumulative deaths by facility
- does not break out resident cumulative deaths by facility
- does not provide either staff or resident cases for the current outbreaks per facility
- does not provide either staff or resident cumulative cases state-wide
- does not provide either staff or resident cumulative deaths state-wide
- does not provide either staff or resident cases for the current outbreaks state-wide
- does not provide a count of total number of facilities impacted