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Mashup Score: 107Analysis & updates | 20,000 Hours of Data Entry: Why We Didn’t Automate Our Data Collection - 4 year(s) ago
In early March 2020, Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer sought to reveal how little COVID-19 testing had been conducted in the United States. Recognizing a critical need for publicly available, comprehensive data, they founded The COVID Tracking Project, which eventually relied on hundreds of volunteers who entered data manually on a daily and weekly basis for a year.Throughout the project, we…
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
From March 2020 to March 2021, our volunteers spent well over 20,000 hours manually entering data. In this post, we talk about why we chose not to automate our data collection. https://t.co/a12OPTo1km
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Mashup Score: 125
To understand any dataset, you have to understand the way its information is compiled. That’s especially true for a patchworked dataset like US COVID-19 data, which is the product of 56 smaller systems belonging to each state and territory in the country. In our year of working with COVID-19 data, we harnessed our attention on these systems and found that the data they produced often reflected…
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
We also link to in-depth resources, both from our own site and from others. Ultimately, what we’ve learned is that when people understand why public health metrics are complicated, trust in the data reporting process grows. https://t.co/sJZooywKrC
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Our data collection ended in March, and soon, the full @COVID19Tracking project will come to a close. In this summary post, we look at how states reported the 5 major COVID-19 metrics & how reporting complexities shaped our understanding of the pandemic. https://t.co/sJZooywKrC
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Mashup Score: 37
When analyzing COVID-19 data, confirmed case counts are obvious to study. But don’t overlook probable cases—and the varying, evolving ways that states have defined them.
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
As we’ve seen with many COVID-19 metrics, there’s often a veneer of uniformity obscuring quiet data discrepancies. In this piece, we look at probable COVID-19 case definitions and the decisions states made about how and when to adopt federal guidance. https://t.co/94W6uMQDPp
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Mashup Score: 11Analysis & updates | The State of State Antigen Test Reporting - 4 year(s) ago
Diagnostic testing is critical to managing the pandemic, especially since some people who carry the virus display no symptoms and a vaccine remains, at minimum, months away. But to date the US has struggled to conduct enough testing, thanks to an inadequate supply of test materials as well as confusion over who should be tested. An additional diagnostic, the antigen test, emerged late this summer…
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
The catch? The pipelines needed to send antigen test results to health officials are brand new. It’s likely we’ll never know just how many people with positive antigen results should have been counted as probable cases. https://t.co/a3Scc3BZyv
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Mashup Score: 183Analysis & updates | How lagging death counts muddled our view of the COVID-19 pandemic - 4 year(s) ago
During the worst parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States struggled to keep up with COVID-19 death counts.
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
During the worst moments of the pandemic, the US public health data infrastructure could not keep up with COVID-19 death counts. Our new analysis looks at the effect of reporting lags on death data reported by states and the CDC: https://t.co/3JyTeTMNLB
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Mashup Score: 34Analysis & updates | Dating Data: How We Used Multiple Dating Schemes to Provide the Most Complete Picture of the Pandemic - 4 year(s) ago
Throughout our year of tracking COVID-19 tests, cases, and outcomes, we were confronted with data organized by numerous dating schemes. Here’s how we came to understand those dating schemes, and the solution we developed for making the best of them.
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
Our latest post digs into these issues and explores the tradeoffs we made in order to publish the best possible historical data. https://t.co/FJhkYUAqan
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Mashup Score: 82Analysis & updates | How and Why The COVID Tracking Project Built a Screenshot System - 4 year(s) ago
One of the basic principles behind The COVID Tracking Project has been the reliability and transparency of the data we collect and report. In service to that, we developed a system for taking screenshots of our original data sources, usually state COVID-19 information websites. We did this for a few reasons:Data provenance: It was important to us to be able to show our work and where the data…
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
In this post, we detail how and why we built our screenshots system. We also hope to offer guidance for any future data collection project that relies on maintaining the provenance, history, and accuracy of data. https://t.co/11OxxG3HuZ
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One of the foundational principles of The COVID Tracking Project is data transparency. We set out to take screenshots of state COVID-19 websites and dashboards to create an archive, show where our data came from, and maintain data history. https://t.co/11OxxG3HuZ
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Mashup Score: 27
Over the past year, The COVID Tracking Project answered thousands of messages from the public, and in doing so we learned just how many people were paying close attention to COVID-19 data. Visitors to our website used the contact form to send us over 4,400 messages between May 2020 and April 2021. We got messages from federal and state government officials, media representatives, businesspeople…
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
We did what we could to explain the data to the people who wrote us, but the people who wrote us also helped us correct errors and understand our own data better. Here’s an inside look at our public help desk. https://t.co/X3JsXCHgvH
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Mashup Score: 74Analysis & updates | Releasing Our State COVID-19 Data Log - 4 year(s) ago
For a year, The COVID Tracking Project compiled state and territorial data from jurisdictional COVID-19 dashboards. On our website, that data was organized into 32 standardized API categories, corralled into neat charts and tables, and updated each day. But that’s not how the data came to us: In the absence of national COVID-19 data standards, states and territories defined and presented their…
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
Today we are releasing our data log, a structured set of notes on state data occurrences and our historical revisions from our year of COVID-19 data collection. https://t.co/akfJPoHxiT
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Mashup Score: 44Analysis & updates | How We Entered COVID-19 Testing and Outcomes Data Every Day for a Year - 4 year(s) ago
We set up a set of roles and a shift system to carefully gather and inspect the data we published.
Source: The COVID Tracking ProjectCategories: General Medicine News, Latest HeadlinesTweet-
In order to do this, we set up a shift system, a set of roles, and a rigorous process of checking and double-checking every data point. Here’s a closer look at how our Data Entry team operated, and what we learned after a year of entering data: https://t.co/2QwVlUq5PW
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We looked to automation as a way to support and supplement the manual work of our volunteers, rather than replace it. This kept us focused on making sure we understood the data & the conclusions we could draw from it, especially as the pandemic evolved. https://t.co/a12OPTo1km