Delaware’s new COVID-19 data dashboard is bigger and better

Delaware Health and Social Services updated its COVID-19 Data Dashboard on Jan. 5, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, you should.

The new dashboard can answer just about any questions you have about COVID-19 rates in Delaware, including the number of positives in schools broken down by district, charter and private; a vaccine tracker that includes information about each phase of the rollout; PPE and healthcare system stats; contact tracing stats; and demographics.

All of the data can be viewed state, county or ZIP code, including the vaccine tracker, so you can get a detailed view of the virus’s impact in your town or neighborhood. And it’s extremely easy to use.

The state COVID-19 rates aren’t encouraging, with the same post-Thanksgiving spike as the rest of the country. At the moment, the number of new positive cases is slowly coming down, but that likely won’t last due to an expected post-Christmas spike. On the upside, for now, hospital capacity and PPE supplies are currently stable.

COVID-19 hospital stats. (Screenshot)

One interesting area of the dashboard is “Venues Visited by Cases,” stats that are based on interviews of Delawareans who’ve tested positive. Most interviewed cases (80%) did not disclose that they participated in an event. Disclosures are voluntary, so they aren’t entirely reliable as far as assessing how many people become positive without breaking CDC safety measures. But the 20% who did disclose most often reported visiting restaurants, church services and the beach, with people also admitting to attending things like dinner parties, weddings and house parties. Whether people were wearing masks is not included in the data.

The In-Person Contagious School Cases Dashboard is informative, but could use some tweaks — for example, district K-12 schools overall have the highest number of positive in-person students and staff across the state compared to charter and private K-12, but there is no “cases per X” data to contextualize the numbers. Still, if you want to know how many in-person cases there are at your child’s district, it’s all broken down there.

COVID-19 school stats. (Screenshot)

P.S. Want to know when you’ll likely get the COVID-19 vaccine yourself? Here’s a look at the Delaware Division of Public Health’s recently updated timeline.