Something My Government Did Right

I’m kind of spiraling out of control on the news front, and finding how best to engage on the racial justice front is consuming so much of my energy that.  In the meantime, I thought I’d check in on the pandemic. Remember the pandemic?

The Washington Post had an interactive website updated almost constantly that showed various statistics — mostly cases and deaths - for the DMV. (That’s the local shorthand for the DC area: DC, Maryland, and Virginia.) It seems to have disappeared, though they still have the graphics for national and international data. (Because the WaPo is a national paper, I have started going to the Baltimore Sun for info on state of Maryland matters.)

But my county government has one of the best government dashboards I’ve ever seen! It shows a wide variety of pertinent information. (Remember, “information” is data in context. A number sitting out there by itself is usually not very useful.) Since the dashboard was first brought to my attention via our very active neighborhood email group, it has been refined and updated. It shows not just real time cases and deaths, but where our capacity to handle cases is relative to the load. Remember, the whole point of flattening the curve was to have the capacity available. Then, for re-opening, we need testing and tracing. I was thinking what a useful addition that information would be to this dashboard, when they added a couple of pages for testing (but not tracing).

I have a long time professional interest in how to use data to tell a story. It’s difficult, and this is an especially good instance where numbers are presented in a way that one can grasp the situation. I’ve given my rave review to the county (hoping the poor under-appreciated data nerds will hear about it) and will also provide the link to some data visualization sites I frequent.

Spoiler alert on the state of my county: as of this writing, we are getting better on almost every front. From the beginning of the serious local outbreak, “acute care beds” (versus ICU or ventilators) has been the big problem.

The chart I show in this post is a static screen shot, the link is to the live site. Each one of the boxes on the first page has a graph on following pages you can click through, with the documentation at the end. Sometimes, the site takes a long to load initially, but clicking through once it’s loaded is quick.