Baltimore City Health Department Unveils Overhauled COVID-19 Dashboard
BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- The Baltimore City Health Department on Thursday unveiled an update to its COVID-19 dashboard, based on feedback from the community and public health experts.
The revamped dashboard is fed by new data sources, which provide up-to-date insights into the number of new cases, deaths, testing volume and percentage of people testing positive on a seven-day average.
This marks the first time the city health department has been able to provide daily updates since December when a Maryland Department of Health network breach kept the city from receiving regular updates.
"Given that MDH has not yet restarted these datastreams, BCHD changed data sources so that cases, deaths, testing, and vaccination information on the dashboard can now be updated daily Monday through Friday," the health department said.
Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa said details listed under "Key Metrics" present Baltimoreans with data points the health department uses to decide when restrictions, such as mask mandates, are needed.
"Although we continue to see daily cases and hospitalizations drop, the dashboard will aid the public and our staff to monitor the data for indicators of surges due to new variants or subvariants of Coronavirus," she said.
Among the new features, users will now find a percentage of people ages 12 and up who have gotten at least one vaccine dose, along with community transmission data levels provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Based on feedback from residents, we are also now displaying the city's current COVID community level as recently released by the CDC," said Dr. Darcy Phelan-Emrick, chief epidemiologist for the city health department.
The CDC uses three metrics to track community spread: new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population in a seven-day period, percentage of staffed hospital inpatient beds used by COVID-19 patients and new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 population in a seven-day span.