HEALTH DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCES CHANGES TO COVID-19 DASHBOARD

The dashboard will change

INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) today announced changes to its COVID-19 dashboard to align with national reporting measurements and better reflect the impact the pandemic is having on communities and healthcare systems.

Beginning with today’s update, which is expected early this evening, the COVID-19 dashboard at www.coronavirus.in.gov will no longer reflect a daily positivity rate. Instead the dashboard will display a seven-day average of cases and indicate whether that number is trending up or down. The dashboard also will cease publishing the state’s county and advisory metric maps and instead follow the community transmission measurements recently announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In addition, the dashboard’s publication schedule will be revised, with updates posted on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week.

Chief Medical Officer Lindsay Weaver, M.D., FACEP, said the changes reflect a national shift toward using hospitalization data as the leading indicator of the impact that COVID-19 has on a community. She said the dashboard update is the first step toward a broader movement toward general surveillance models, such as those used to measure current levels of influenza.

“The increased use of at-home tests and other antigen tests that are never reported to the state has diluted the value of posting a daily positivity rate,” Weaver said. “A better measurement is the impact that COVID-19 is having on our healthcare systems, and our dashboard revisions will make it much easier to see how hospitals are being impacted.”

Weaver said the dashboard changes will include the ability to sort metrics by demographics, including age, race and ethnicity, and will provide a clearer breakdown of COVID-19 hospitalizations as part of the total hospital census.

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