A real-time COVID-19 surveillance dashboard to support epidemic response in Connecticut: lessons from an academic-health department partnership

Abstract

In response to the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, numerous institutions published COVID-19 dashboards for reporting epidemiological statistics at the county, state, or national level. However, statistics for smaller cities were often not reported, requiring these areas to develop their own data processing pipelines. For under-resourced departments of health, the development of these pipelines was challenging, leading them to rely on nonspecific and often delayed infection statistics during the pandemic. To avoid this issue, the Stamford, Connecticut Department of Health (SDH) contracted with the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health to develop an online dashboard that displays real-time case, death, test, vaccination, hospitalization, and forecast data for their city, allowing SDH to monitor trends for specific demographic and geographic groups. Insights from the dashboard allowed SDH to initiate timely and targeted testing/vaccination campaigns. The dashboard is widely used and highlights the benefit of public-academic partnerships in public health, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Environmental scan of COVID-19 infection dashboards in the Florida public school system

“…For example, dashboards should regularly update daily cases of students and staffs (separately) per school in the county. In addition, dashboards should provide a full timeline of COVID-19 cases since August 2021, which enables researchers to trace down the COVID-19 cases throughout the school year and conduct temporal trend analyses (3,10,11,15). Moreover, it is important to provide metadata so the audience can understand how accountable the data is (16).…”

“…10 Glades County stopped providing information when we revisited on May 26, 2022. 11 Indian River County stopped providing information from April 29, 2022. 12 Lee County provides only aggregated daily number for the full timeline.…”

“…There is no consensus on which audience should be a target of COVID-19 dashboards. While some experts argue that dashboards should provide public health information to the general public (3,(6)(7)(8), others point to the need to inform public health workers, researchers, and policy makers (2,4,(9)(10)(11).…”

Lessons for the HIV response from structural innovations catalysed by COVID-19

“…COVID-19 transformed the use of health data for impact. User-friendly dashboards, updated daily, have enabled rapid public health interventions, 28 ongoing tracking of hospital and intensive care capacity has supported health system planning, 29 wastewater surveillance has provided early evidence of localised increases in SARS-CoV-2 incidence, 30 tracking of mobile phone data has provided evidence of the effectiveness of COVID-19 lockdowns 31 and molecular epidemiology has accelerated the identification of novel variants and phenotypic characteristics. 32 The HIV response has generated a host of innovative approaches to the collection and strategic use of data.…”