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The coronavirus tracker we just published evolved from an internal dashboard developed to help reporters & editors keep track of the spread of #coronavirus in the state and the counties we cover. I'll walk through an example of what the dashboard can do: https://extras.mercurynews.com/coronavirus-tracker/
For instance, I live in Alameda County. How is my county doing, in relation to the rest of the state and neighboring counties? First, I'll look at the state's new daily cases, which have been slowly but steadily increasing over the past weeks.
Then I select Alameda from the dropdown menu, and the trend looks similar, a general upward trend recently, but its looking worse now than April, when the new cases were much flatter. Deaths seem to be relatively stable.
So, cases are going up in Alameda County, but how is it compared to other areas? This graphic helps show the counties more deeply impacted. Alameda has 181 cases per 100k residents, less than half of LA's rate, but higher than Santa Clara, the first known hotspot in California.
But what's going on right now? This map shows the rate of new cases (cases reported in the past two weeks) per capita, to show where in the state the virus is CURRENTLY spreading. On this map Alameda looks ok, way better than Imperial and Kings County, where cases are bubbling up
Unfortunately Alameda is one of a handful of counties that does not report daily testing numbers, so we can't tell if the new cases are coming from increased testing, but we can look at hospitalizations, often cited as a good metric for determining where we stand.
The California hospitalization trends (screenshot in last tweet) have been on a slow downward trend since early April, but there have been bumps along the way. Alameda has had more significant recent increases, with hospitalizations back to the level it was early in the shutdown.
We have a deeper dive for the Bay Area, with new case rates per 10k residents, daily deaths, and daily testing rates. As you can see, Alameda was doing well on the case rate in early April, when it met the new standard for reopening, but itis now moving further from that standard
