COVID19 Dashboard 2.0
We’re pleased to release the second major revision to the North Texas COVID Data Viewer! Many of you have asked for more detailed information on hospitalization data. We’ve heard you, worked with our data partners, and made the following changes.
Scope of the Data
As you know, our hospital utilization data comes from the North Central Texas Trauma Regional Advisory Council (NCTTRAC), They collect data every day from more than 140 hospitals in the 19-county Trauma Services Area E (TSA-E). This is bigger than the 13-county Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington CBSA, for which we report most disease information. We’ve changed the scope of the hospital data to align the geographies on the home page and other pages. The hospitalization data on the home page now reflects the same 13 counties of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington CBSA that are included in the infection data.
New Hospitalization Summary Page
We’ve added a new hospitalization page that allows users to see Total Capacity, ICU Capacity, and Ventilator Utilization over time. It also adds Lab-Confirmed COVID Hospitalizations over time, COVID Encounters (ED visits, Med/Surg Admits, and ICU Admits) over time, and Capacity by Bed Type over time.
More COVID Hospitalization Data Points
We’ve added some new data points to the original COVID hospitalization page. This page shows current values and compares them to the previous day and previous week. These indicators now include:
- Tracking the Total Occupancy, ICU Occupancy, and Vent Utilization Rates;
- The number of Lab-Confirmed COVID patients, both as a raw number and as a percent of patients in the hospital;
- Number of Lab-Confirmed + Suspected COVID patients, both as a raw number and as a percent of patients in the hospital;
- Number of ER Visits in the past 24 hours COVID-suspected, also expressed as a percent of ER visits;
- The number of COVID-suspected Med/Surg and ICU admits in the past 24 hours; and,
- The number of patients in this hospital who are COVID positive and ventilated.
Drill Down by County
For both the new hospitalization page and the COVID hospitalization page, we’ve added the ability (with permission of NCTTRAC) to parse out the 13-county numbers by Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton Counties (individually) and all other counties (combined). This will let users better understand how hospitals in their community are doing.
Changing to 7-Day Averages
We see a good deal of seasonality in the hospitalization data. Human behavior and our underlying systems create patterns in the data. For instance, we tend to see more ICU admissions on some weekdays than others. As a result, a Tuesday may be better understood compared to other Tuesdays than to the Monday that preceds it.
Because of this seasonality, we’ve moved all the hospitalization data to a 7-day moving average. That is, the number reported for Friday represents the average of Friday and the preceding six days. This shift from 3-day to 7-day moving averages also mitigates the impact of daily variations in reporting rates. Moreover, it means that the trends we see in the data are more likely to represent real shifts in conditions rather than artifacts of reporting patterns.
