“Providing a county-level mapping for the most recent two-week period also provides much more actionable data for both public health professionals and the public,” he said. But Heiman criticized the department’s continued gaps in racial and ethnic data.
The agency faced criticism for poor viewing of the data, leading to confusion. Previous maps showed legends that constantly changed as new cases were added. That design choice made it difficult to determine where cases were increasing. in the state.
DPH said the new maps feature a white-to-red color scheme with a fixed scale that will be updated every four weeks. Old maps will be archived for comparison.
DPH also updated its charts showing daily reported cases and deaths. Cases were previously traced by the state only by symptom onset, test date, or test result date. Deaths were previously reported by date of death only.
The state’s new website allows users to view cases by report date or symptom onset date, and deaths by report date or confirmed date of death, similar to the AJC dashboard.
The DPH coronavirus case and death charts previously left some viewers with the impression that cases and deaths decreased dramatically in the past 14 days, when in reality the most recent days lacked complete data due to delays in report of confirmed cases and deaths.
DPH has suffered some shameful setbacks since the start of the pandemic. In May, the state acknowledged grouping viral diagnostic tests, which are aimed at finding new infections, and serological tests, which look for signs of past infection, which inflated the numbers of state tests.
DPH also previously released a bar chart of cases by county that was out of chronological order, making cases appear to be falling when they were not. The chart was fixed after the online taunt.
