Snapshot of Florida data; in-depth analysis to come tomorrow

Sometime in the late evening on September 29, 2020, the Florida Department of Health released a “detailed” look at the data they feel comfortable sharing with the public about COVID-19 cases in K-12 schools.

The data lists cases from Sept. 20-26 and from Sept. 6-26 separately, for students and various levels of staff. It also lists symptomatic/not symptomatic. And this data is for every school in the state (except all the ones they left out- more about that later).

To get this snapshot out within a few hours of the data being released, I’ve aggregated the data by county for this analysis.

You can access their pdf directly here (assuming they don’t again delete it), or download the aggregated table or shapefile here.

Let’s start by taking a look at the big numbers.

Before the release of this data, The Covid Monitor reported cases in Florida k-12 schools based on the data being released from school districts themselves.

The Covid Monitor’s Data (37 districts reporting)

3,123 total cases
2,001 students
984 staff and
139 not specified

That goes back to the earliest date for each of the 37 counties that had published their own data online. Some districts started earlier than others, but all by August 31.

About 75% of students enrolled/staff working at Florida schools were represented by those 37 districts. Meaning the public had zero data about the other 25%, but a fair chunk of the state, all things considered.

DOH’s report only shows data from September 6 through September 26 (they don’t say why that’s the limit, but there it is).

Here’s their figures for that time period:

DOH’s data, from Sept. 29, 2020 (all 67 districts reporting)

2,643 total cases
Students: 1,883
Staff: 760

Houston, we have a problem.

That’s 480 fewer cases than officially reported by 37 of 67 districts since August.

When you compare the data between the districts and the state, accounting for the time period limitation, there are some significant differences overall.

Data	DOH Data (67 counties)	Districts Data (37 counties)
Total	2,643	3,123
Student	1,883	2,026
Staff	760	984
Not specified	0	139

Data from DOH includes all 67 counties/districts reported for the period of 9/6-9/26. The district data shows only the 37 districts who have been independently reporting, during the same period.

There are also a few similarities.

In DOH’s data, 71% of cases are students.
In the district data, 65% of cases are students.
In the 30 counties not reporting themselves (so excluding self-reporting districts), 77% of cases were students. Cases reported by DOH in districts not previously captured by The Covid Monitor are all of 654 total cases, so a shockingly small contribution to the bucket

Our policy at The Covid Monitor is to defer to districts when state and district data don’t align. We’ve built relationships with schools and work to figure out the discrepancies, something my team at The Covid Monitor will be very busy working on through this week.

So what we end up with is a mix of state and district data, often with no explanation of what either is reporting, why they are reporting that why, why they’ve chosen to remove schools or count cases like this or that, etc.

Totals of state and districts reporting

3,777 Total Cases
2435 students (64%)
1203 staff (32%)
139 not specified (4%)

One of my first questions was: in districts that are self-reporting, is the data from DOH the same?

In most cases, no, it isn’t.

In the table below, we’re looking at whether or not a district reported more cases in students and staff (over), less (under), or about the same (even), compared with DOH data for the same county over the Sept. 6-26 period.

Under-reporting could be the result of slow contact-tracing, a school defining its own “active” case terms, or indiscriminately removing cases at their discretion.

Over-reporting most likely means the district is becoming aware of cases directly from people in its school (students and staff), and doesn’t need to wait for DOH. Or that the district is including cases that for some reason DOH isn’t.

Neither is necessarily good or bad, provided the different circumstances that could lead to either result. With communication, we could better understand why these discrepancies exist and how to rectify those differences.

Though in general, I would be cautious about trusting a district that consistently under-reports. They may be removing cases without cause. And knowing how much DOH didn’t include in their report (confirmed cases across the state) and their chronic under-reporting, a district the under-reports what DOH is reporting is worrisome.

I’d be more likely to trust a school district that is over-reporting, because it most likely means the students, families and staff feel comfortable reporting their positive tests to the school directly, rather than waiting for DOH to disclose (which they may never do).

District	Student Reporting	Staff Reporting
Alachua	Over	Over
Bay	Under	Under
Brevard	Over	Under
Broward	Over	Even
Calhoun	Even	Even
Charlotte	Under	Under
Citrus	Over	Over
Clay	Even	Over
Collier	Over	Over
Duval	Under	Over
Flagler	Even	Even
Hamilton	Over	N/A
Hardee	Over	Over
Hendry	Over	Over
Hernando	Even	Over
Highlands	Over	Over
Hillsborough	Over	Over
Indian River	Even	Under
Lake	Over	Over
Lee	Under	Under
Leon	Over	Over
Manatee	Over	Over
Marion	Over	Over
Monroe	Even	Over
Nassau	Even	Even
Orange	Under	Over
Osceola	Even	Even
Palm Beach	Under	Over
Pasco	Even	Even
Pinellas	Under	Over
Polk	Over	Over
Putnam	Over	Over
Sarasota	Over	Over
Seminole	Over	Over
St. Johns	Over	Even
Sumter	Over	Even
Taylor	Over	Over
Volusia	Over	Over

Data compares cases reported by districts from 9/6-9/26 with cases reported by DOH for time same time period.

There’s another statistic in there that DOH is likely hoping you won’t notice in their giant spreadsheet – the figures of symptomatic vs asymptomatic.

Across all counties (using only the DOH data), 76% of cases reported one or more symptom. 19% did not report symptoms, and there’s no data for the remaining 5%

That may seem unexpectedly high at first.

But if you’ve been paying attention to recent research on the subject, you’d know that 76% symptomatic is actually a low figure. The CDC showed that only 3% of school-aged children reported having no symptoms.

We’ll talk more about how this data compares with the recent CDC report on cases in school-aged children from May to Sept tomorrow, both here on our blog, on The Covid Monitor site, and with CNN’s Don Lemon.

We’ll also get into temporal data, which this DOH document does not provide.

It’s important to note that most of the schools in Miami-Dade/Broward/Palm Beach counties were online for the majority of this period, and some are continuing online into October.

Diving into the school data later this week:

When we drill down to the school-level data provided by DOH, the problems get even worse.

My son’s school confirmed its two cases during the time period of DOH’s reporting. I found about those cases first from an anonymous tip to The Covid Monitor. His school is not even listed in the DOH data. From the responses online within the first few hours of this report being released, a lot of schools were left off from this data. We’re working to validate exactly what was removed and why in the next few days.

Here are the 10 schools DOH claims have the most case, Consistent with district and CDC findings, all but one are high schools.

School	County	Level	Student Cases	% Reporting one or more symptom
PACE HIGH SCHOOL (PACE)	Santa Rosa	High	30	97
COTTONDALE HIGH SCHOOL	Jackson	High	18	89
BAKER COUNTY SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL	Baker	K-12	13	100
OLDSMAR CHRISTIAN SCHOOL	Pinellas	High	13	77
CHOCTAWHATCHEE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL	Okaloosa	High	12	100
OLYMPIA HIGH	Orange	High	12	67
HARDEE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL	Hardee	High	12	58
A. CRAWFORD MOSLEY	Bay	High	10	100
WEST ORANGE HIGH	Orange	High	10	90
NEWSOME HIGH SCHOOL	Hillsborough	High	10	60
WAKULLA HIGH SCHOOL	Wakulla	High	9	100

Something I’ll discuss more in the coming days is how teacher cases are far more likely to occur in the elementary setting than they are the high school setting. In fact, according to DOH, there are only 17 schools in the state where more than 1 teacher has had a confirmed case – 78% were in elementary schools.

Of course this data is absolutely wrong, because Hillsborough alone reported 43 schools in its district with more than teacher or staff member case, totaling 58 cases in all. 43% were elementary staff, 38% high, and 19% middle.

Across the 20 districts that report cases by student/staff by grade level, the percent of student-staff cases goes from 54% student – 38% staff in elementary schools, to 70% student – 21% staff in high school.

The counties that report data for cases by student and staff by school level are:

Alachua

Citrus

Collier

Duval

Hardee

Hernando

Highlands

Hillsborough

Indian River

Lake

Lee

Leon

Manatee

Orange

Osceola

Palm Beach

Pasco

Pinellas

Sarasota

Seminole

We have more coming, so stay tuned!

How a change in reporting policy created a dramatic change in counting deaths

Recent Changes in Florida’s Covid-19 Death Reporting

Recently we wrote about the increasing delays in reporting Covid-19 deaths in Florida.

As an example: deaths reported in the two-week period between July 21 and August 3, the 50^th, 75^th, and 95^th percentile of days between date of death and date of report was 5, 10, and 20, respectively.

For the week of August 23 to 29, these figures have increased to 12, 28, and 41 days.

This suggests that the number of deaths that occurred in mid-to-late July (and through August, most likely) was far higher than what “current” reports indicated, complicating inferences about the trends in deaths by day.

After reaching out to the Florida Department of Health about the dramatic change in reporting, they confirmed in an email that the official policy of how they reported deaths changed sometime between June and August.

From March through at least May, as soon as DOH learned that a covid-19 positive person had died from complications of the illness, whether from a hospital, the police, or other authoritative source, they updated the case line data to reflect that information.

Sometime later, the state would receive the official death certificate from the Medical Examiner’s office and THEN add the official date of death to their internal data.

This time death-by-date-of-death data used to be represented on DOH’s now-bug-ridden dashboard as the number of resident deaths per date by county.

But two changes occurred during the summer:

First, DOH no longer allows users to view deaths by date of death for each county. The data is state-wide only.

Second, they stopped adding deaths when they were notified, and began waiting for the arrival of the death certificate before adding any information about the deaths to their count.

When asked when this change occurred and why, DOH responded, “Unfortunately, I do not have an exact date of the change,” followed by the stock response of “This is an emerging, rapidly evolving situation…”

The timing seems somewhat suspect as the change in reporting appears at the peak of deaths, perhaps to slow the number of deaths being reported and spread them out over a longer span of time. It could simply be a focus on clearing out the large backlog of deaths in July, or that the state’s scantly-staffed offices were overwhelmed. Maybe the change the Medical Examiner’s office made to allow doctors to sign off on death certificates plays a role here. Without answers from DOH, there’s no telling why or how it happened; we can only look at how the change played out in the data.

The figure above shows the cumulative count of deaths reported by date of death. The blue lines are deaths that occurred between July 20 and August 6; the red lines are deaths that occurred August 7 onward (omitting the most recent 10 days). Note that the date labels at the end of each line represent the current count (smoothed) by date of death in descending order from left to right.

We can see that the blue lines follow a relatively similar distribution. The change in reported deaths from one day to the next is gradual – a function of the trend in true deaths by date and the reporting process. In general, the distribution of deaths reported appears consistent for the blue period. Beginning with deaths on August 7, there is a significant difference in the distribution.

First, notice the large drop in reported deaths between 8/6 and 8/7. There is prominent periodicity in the counts by day but the half-cycle that begins on 8/4 and ends on 8/8 has an unexpectedly large drop.

Notice the change in distribution from 8/6 to 8/7. The red period starts flattening much earlier and rather than increasing linearly around day 14 – as happens in the blue period – it flattens altogether. It appears that even a third distinctive cluster may be forming (from 8/15 to 8/18).

Perhaps most important to see is the trajectory of the blue periods, which do not appear to be slowing; there are likely many more deaths to be counted from July and into August. For such a process, we would expect the count to level off and gradually approach the final value which is not observed.

Some of the differences between these periods may turn out to be a true reduction in the number of deaths, and it is unknown how the volume of deaths affects the reporting distribution.

However, if reporting processes were to remain constant, we would not expect such a dramatic decrease in deaths in subsequent days. The significant and rapid change in distribution suggests a major overhaul in policy from the Florida Department of Health.

Whatever the cause, the effect has been an appreciable drop in recently reported deaths that do not appear to be entirely the result of deaths decreasing in this time. There is also an apparent stalling of deaths being reported for death dates between 8/7 and 8/13.

This information is important to keep in mind while sifting through the ‘deaths by date of death’ misinformation out there (namely, from the Florida Department of Health itself, but also from self-proclaimed pseudo-experts at “business” schools).

There has very clearly been a change in the reporting of deaths and to use old estimates (e.g. 90% of deaths are reported in 21 days) would seem misguided, leading to premature celebration and further poor decision-making by both politicians and the public.

A Note on The Relationship Between Covid-19 Death Occurrence and Reported Date

Much has been written about the relationship between date of death and the date the death is reported by Florida DOH.

Despite it being a relatively trivial footnote in the Florida Coronavirus Saga, it has become somewhat of an obsession by some laymen.

While there is value in studying the distribution of time between date of death and the date that the death is reported, it has increasingly been used to push a conspiratorial narrative (i.e. ‘The Media’ is intentionally reporting deaths as increasing when they are actually decreasing). The basic argument – treated as some grand revelation worthy of a Nobel – is that the number of deaths on a day is not actually the number of people that have died that day; well, no shit. Would you like a cookie, Mr. Cole?

What Professor Cole and his like-minded disciples seem to ignore is the nature of arithmetic itself. The number of deaths reported must equal the number of deaths that have occurred. If some time periods are over-reported (reported deaths on a day greater than actual deaths) then, by definition, some days must be under-reported. Where is the outrage in the “misleading” reporting of that?Though you will never hear these self-proclaimed prophets mention this, the numbers do not lie. Let’s have a look.

The chart above shows the number of deaths reported (in blue) compared to the number of deaths that occurred (in red) on each day. Dates in the past 35 days are excluded as some deaths are likely to have been unreported thus far. The lines are added to smoothen the day-to-day noise (fitted with a generalized additive model.

We can see that in periods of increasing deaths (March 21 – April 10 and June 20 – July 20) that the actual deaths per date are greater than the reported deaths per date. This is not a conspiracy of “The Media” or Florida DOH; it is simply the nature of having to process hundreds of additional deaths. If we look at the first peek of deaths in mid-April, we observe a corresponding peek several weeks later in reported deaths – a ‘catch-up’ period (perhaps what we are seeing in reported deaths now). As deaths plateau and decline, the two are generally equal.

In theory, one could look at the past distribution of days between death and report to provide some inference into the ‘true peak’ of deaths. For example, if 90% of deaths are reported within two weeks, simply divide the count from two weeks ago by 0.9 to get an estimate of true deaths. While this may be a sound method assuming a stable distribution, changes in the distribution of lags makes this much more difficult in practice. And therein lies the rub.

The chart above shows that the distribution of lags has steadily been increasing over the past three weeks.

Deaths reported between August 4-10 had a median time of five days; that is, half the deaths reported occurred within the previous five days. Ninety-five percent occurred within 22 days. Compare this to the most recent week (August 18-24) with a 50^th and 95^th quantile of 8 and 33 days, respectively. Accounting for these unpredictable changes to ‘fill in’ reported deaths seem to be a fool’s errand rife with erroneous conclusions. All of this, of course, ignores the deaths that have yet to be counted. We know given a death is reported, the distribution of the date of death. It is increasingly difficult to know the reverse (which will never be truly known until long from now).

So what is the purpose in rushing to pin-point peaks of actual death other than to bolster a political ideal or agenda?

Florida officials have become infamous for premature celebration during this pandemic, so some measure of patience is needed when dealing with its data.

With the recent change in how medical examiner’s report deaths to the state, it’s unclear whether death information will be processed when DOH receives it, or if additional validation of COVID deaths will be required, further slowing down the rate of reporting, so all of this may be moot.

A new adventure for COVID Action: The COVID Monitor

When I decided to launch my Florida COVID Action site on June 11, I had no idea if anyone would care or even notice.

No state in the country had been so plagued by corruption and politics in data reporting as to warrant an “alternative” resource of official information.

But when I was fired as manager of the public data and surveillance data systems at the Florida Department of Health in May, the media attention blew up beyond what I ever imagined.

In the process, an information void was created. Knowing the data the state was pushing was unreliable and untrustworthy, Floridians had nowhere to turn for information about COVID-19 in their state. I felt somewhat responsible for that void and thus felt morally obligated to try to help those who didn’t trust the state.

So I committed myself to continue doing the job of reporting the data and science to the public, free of charge, for as long as they needed it, pulling in all available state datasets to give the people as much information as I could scrape.

I have been living and breathing this project night and day since that time, and the support I’ve received both personally and for my new ‘company’ has been tremendous.

Less than two months later, I watched another problem develop that no state in this country had yet faced: the potential impacts of reopening schools during a pandemic.

Most states closed schools for the year in March, when the number of cases across the entire country was only at about 7,000 total.

Although Governor DeSantis refused to shut down the state for spring break, schools switched to all-online instruction on March 17, when Florida had recorded fewer than 300 total cases of the virus.

Nearly every Florida school district in the state opens up by August 31, with more than 600,000 COVID-19 positive persons tested to date.

If we shut down schools in March because of a few hundred cases state-wide, why are they opening back up when Florida registers thousands of new cases per day?

Over the summer, teachers who taught ESE courses or coached sports teams got sick. Some even died.

Teachers started reaching out to me directly with their concerns about the upcoming school year. Concerned about retaliation, they asked if there was a way they could report what was going in schools without being identified.

So I launched a new dashboard to provide teachers, staff, administrators, parents, and even students a way to safely and 100% anonymously report information about cases in schools, even if officials didn’t want to release the information.

I immediately became swamped with reports – not just in Florida, but across the entire country. Hundreds a day. Working on this site and the new schools project became a 20-hours-per-day job. I was exhausted. I was worried that I would neglect either or both projects if I continued to try to handle that work by myself.

So I started reaching out for help. I wrote letters to universities, and academic and professional researchers about my idea for the project: a central database tracking and reporting cases in every school in the country. I even wrote on Twitter that I needed help.

Enter FinMango, a financial literacy non-profit (501c(3)) who shifted gears to COVID-19 education during the pandemic. They had partnered with Google’s COVID-19 Open Data Project, and had the passion, intensity and resources needed for a successful collaboration.

We launched our new joint-venture yesterday, The Covid Monitor.

From our new site you can access our map and data site, report cases in your school safely and anonymously, volunteer your time or donate to the organization. Donations to this project through FinMango are tax-deductible.

I personally will not be compensated for my own time on this project. If you wish to support me or Florida COVID Action, choose one of the buttons below where appropriate.

Support The COVID Monitor through FinMango (a registered 501c(3), donations made here are tax-deductible)

Support The COVID Monitor

Support Rebekah through her personal GoFundMe site (please review GoFundMe’s policy toward taxation for more info)

Support Rebekah Directly

Support Florida COVID Action, a registered Florida LLC and social benefits corporation (learn more about B-Corps here)

Support Florida COVID Action

If you’re a school administrator or state official and would like to connect with us, please email us at: Plans@TheCovidMonitor.com

Members of the media are encouraged to participate in our data collection system, as well. To learn more about how to automate your data reporting with The Covid Monitor, please contact plans@TheCovidMonitor.com

Information about our collaboration team:

FinMango is a global non-profit organization on a mission to promote and advance financial inclusion worldwide—however, we recognize the importance of combating COVID-19 and are actively pivoting towards catering to the needs of researchers leading the fight.

Florida COVID Action LLC is a Florida-based social benefits corporation made of scientists specializing in public health research, data science, and data visualization. Founded by Florida scientist and whistleblower Rebekah Jones, Covid Action is committed to data access and transparency during the coronavirus pandemic (and beyond).

Monitoring, tracking and reporting COVID-19 Cases in the USA’s 13,000+ school districts: A FinMango and Florida COVID Action Initiative

Announcement by the new team: The Wolf, Badger, Dolphin, and the Platypus

FinMango and Florida COVID Action are partnering on a ground-breaking joint project, launching the nation’s first COVID-19 dataset focusing on coronavirus cases in every K-12 school district in the U.S.A.

Our two organizations utilize and connect with a wide range of data providers to collect information pertaining to COVID-19, including school opening dates and formats, restrictions and policies regarding masks and distancing, and the number of cases for each district.

Data currently available about COVID-19 cases in schools exists in fragmented pockets across the country with no standardized reporting method in place, making it difficult to locate, synthesize and analyze.

Our initiative ensures that COVID-19 data is accurate, transparent, and published in a single, public platform—an effort that will more effectively inform decision makers as they work to understand and mitigate the effects of COVID-19.

Through this partnership, FinMango is expanding its work to address the pandemic, with the use of Google Cloud’s COVID-19 Public Dataset Program, a hosted repository to aid researchers, data scientists, and analysts in the effort to combat COVID-19.

For more information or to volunteer, visit us at finmago.org/covid or contact us at data@finmango.org.

Information about our collaboration team:

Florida COVID Action began collecting and publishing reports of cases in schools in July 2020 as “The Covid Monitor,” and will continue to collect reports submitted by the public during the new collaboration with FinMango and Google. To learn more, click here.

Florida DOH data arrives nine hours late with missing parts, causing first major delay in updates since June

Anyone who obsessively follows the Florida Department of Health data API’s as much as we do will tell you something funny has been going on at DOH this week.

Yesterday, on August 6, the data came in late again, and with 66,000 more cases than what DOH stated in their morning press release. Where these 66,000 cases came from, and more importantly where they went, remains a mystery.

When questioned by members of the media about why the cases shot up and then disappeared, DOH Director of Communications Alberto Moscoso went on the offensive, blaming ESRI, the developer who hosts the software, for the cases who apparated from the data and the delay in updating data today.

“This issue stems from the vendor that the Department has partnered with to create and maintain the Dashboard,” his office said in an email. “The Department has engaged with the vendor to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”

That’s strange because I asked the vendor, who Moscoso later identified as Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), about it and they didn’t receive any communication about this problem today from DOH.

When asked how a file uploaded to their system could just create 66,000 unique new positive persons, one ESRI representative cleared up the matter adding, “we don’t touch that data at all.”

That’s true. The process of updating the data is as simple as transferring it from one system to another via Python. If you have to, you can just manually overwrite the data by uploading a csv file directly into the online interface.

Take this as an example.

On Saturday, April 11, Epidemiology decided to switch the language for querying Merlin (the case database) to SQL, and didn’t tell me. So when I ran the updates the next day, April 12, there were loads off issues and errors in the data. I managed to get it pushed out for the morning update, but was running behind on the evening update. Back then we updated twice daily – 11 AM ET and 6:30 PM ET.

I got a call around 7 that night, cramming to fix the code because I was already running behind about a half-hour behind, that my parent’s house had been destroyed in an EF-4 tornado and that my mom was missing. Her Jeep was still in the driveway, according to a neighbor, and the house was gone.

It wasn’t until the next morning that we learned she was ok.

The updates were still less than an hour behind that night.

A change in programming language and my mom missing with our house gone, and I still had the data up less than a hour behind. By myself.

There’s no excuse for this.

The public has the right to this data. DOH could have simply uploaded the csv files to their website for people to download if they thought it was an ESRI issue, but they didn’t.

There’s another issue with this data becoming increasingly unreliable and untrustworthy.

The case line data is the only location to get information about pediatric cases on a daily basis. DOH only updates their pediatric report once a week, and it doesn’t include all of the details that the case line data does, and it isn’t possible to track individual pediatric cases to see if any are removed from the weekly report.

Florida COVID Action launched a school monitoring project this week which allows the public to safely and anonymously report cases in their schools. We need the case line data to verify the data in those reports.

I wish I could just accio data, but I fear my wizarding powers are limited to multi-tasking and being ignored by one Stephen Colbert.

View larger map

Confused about DOH testing data? You’re not alone.

Article and data by both the Wolf and the Badger

On any given day, we receive half a dozen emails about the Florida Department of Health’s (DOH) conflicting testing data.

We’ve summarized the three primary data resources for pulling testing data from DOH, and created a standalone dashboard to show all that DOH provides.

Testing data by PDF Report:

The daily PDF report issued by DOH every day contains a summary (page 2) of the previous date’s testing figures.

The state previously (and controversially) switched from reporting the number of people tested to the number of tests processed per day, with a positivity rate calculated from new cases over total tests, which included repeat negatives but not repeat positives.

They switched to number of people tested per day (including duplicates, but only counting each person once per each day they were tested), but still pull out “new positive” separately from “number of positives.”

In early July, DOH started dumping in negative and positive antigen tests, which have a notoriously high false-negative rate, with regular PCR testing *, without specifying which results were antigen versus PCR.

Through May 2020, DOH did not create cases for people who only tested positive with antigen results — a second PCR positive result was required. Now, however, the report claims cases are created for antigen positive persons, but responses to our inquiries from DOH staff seem inconsistent.

Testing data by reporting laboratories

Much further down in the same report, you’ll find the lab data (example below)

We wrote a script to pull the lab data every day and calculate the number of new lab results for each of the inconclusive, negative, positive and total results columns. We show the new number of labs and positivity by day, and by week.

You can access that API through our GIS Open Data Hub here.

Testing data by DOH county data files

Then there’s the DOH county layer files that I built while still at DOH, which contain several fields for testing data that were (while I was there) representative of the number of individuals tested (not tests, retests, etc).

The dashboard and its data services have been spotty, at best, since I left DOH, but DOH insists the data is right, so we’re throwing those numbers in, too.

We put all three resources on one page to try to make sense of it, with help from Florida epidemiologists and members of the COVID Tracking Project.

Because the data is provided for the entire state, there is no filter option to break it down further by county. We’re working now to bring that to you as soon as possible.

Click here to see the stand-alone dashboard for DOH testing data

Of course you can see this data on our main data dashboard here, or our grand-daddy version here.

We’re four days into our August fundraising drive!

All of our data, maps, applications and services are provided free to the public.

Please help us continue to provide these services, and to expand our resources, by donating to our site.

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Notes:
PCR testing’s false negative rate can range from 5% – 20%, depending on the sensitivity of the test and time since exposure, though can be as high as 68%. Read more here: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1495
Antigen false-negative rate can range from 33%-70%. Read more here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7302192/

National Reporting System for Schools; Additional resources for states

Our national survey for reopening schools already includes data from 36 U.S. States, as of 10:00 AM ET today.

The results of our preliminary surveys should worry anyone keeping an eye on how schools plan to reopen this fall.

Additionally, we’ve compiled a list of resources for all 50 US states (and several US Territories), which has been added to both our new dashboard and old dashboard.

COVID-19 dashboards, apps, & resources for USA

By connecting you with other state resources we are neither endorsing nor validating their data, use of data, or publication of data.

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Guam
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Northern Mariana Islands
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Puerto Rico
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

Please remember: All of our applications, maps and data are provided free to the public, paid for entirely by public donations. To help keep us up and running, please consider donating.

Florida COVID Action Launches National School Survey and Anonymous Reporting Site

Today we launched our first national products — a series of surveys, apps and maps where teachers, students, parents and staff can safely and anonymously report COVID-19 cases in their schools.

After receiving disturbing reports about confirmed cases in schools being swept under the rug from Florida, Georgia, California and beyond, I decided there needed to be an outlet where teachers, staff, faculty and even students could go to report cases at their schools.

Click here to report cases in your school safely and anonymously

This information is HIPAA compliant as we collect no names or personal information other than that a case (or cases) has been confirmed at the school.

We will make sure to match this data up with FDOH case data, and we will be adding a school-age case tracker for each Florida county to our school dashboard shortly (dashboard is still in development). We maintain the Florida county data ourselves, but for other states you will have to refer to your state’s data resources for cases. We recently added a list of these resources to our old-fashioned dashboard.

We also wanted to know when school districts around the country are planning to reopen, so we built another survey which immediately populates this dashboard (embedded below):

This survey also provides an outlet for teachers and families to express how they feel about their respective district’s actions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and what options are available regarding online, in-person, and hybrid learning.

Click here to fill out the NATIONAL anonymous school reopening survey

We also published a new page dedicated to education data and reporting, which we’ll continue to build throughout the next two weeks.