Reporting Changes and Site Updates

Starting on January 24, the WCHD switched from daily case reports to weekly case reports and dropped all reporting of negative tests. They’re shifting resources to vaccine distribution, and I’m certinaly not going to complain about that. Most of the reporting done on this site has been based on WCHD reports. The change in their reporting practices forces me to rethink and redo a few parts of this site.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s changed so far:

• The WCIL daily dashboard now reports day-to-day numbers drawn from IDPH. Daily updates of this site will continue starting today.
• The MR238 dashboard draws case numbers from IDPH data and combines this with demographic information about youth cases taken from weekly WCHD reports. The day-to-day youth cases can no longer be reported but are included in the prior week’s data seen in the weekly table. Daily updates of this site will resume starting today.
• The MR238 Historical Site will continue to be updated with weekly data displayed on the dashboard. Data prior to 1/24 is the previously reported WCHD data. Data after that date will be the new IDPH and WCHD combination report.

Daily new cases, tests, and deaths are still reported on the IDPH statewide statistic site. I’ve shifted the WCIL daily dashboard over to this data. At the time of this post, all that data is IDPH data. For the most part the IDPH and WCHD numbers match, but they have varried historically. The real loss is that the WCHD reports included demographics of positive cases and deaths. They continue to report these data, but only on a week-to-week basis.

The demographic and historical reports for WCIL are frozen while I think about how best to report these data going forward. I will most certainly provide weekly demographic reports but cummulative case reports based on daily data are not going to be possible at this time. On the other hand, the IDPH does provide day-to-day data on vaccinations and I intend to include these data on the site.