Nevada’s Department of Health and Human Services Office of Analytics released a number of enhancements to the COVID-19 dashboard.
The dashboard will be enhanced in the following areas:
- Increased emphasis on moving averages and recent trends;
- Including county criteria and related trends as well as Statewide comparative numbers for county criteria measures;
- Attributing testing numbers and cases to specimen collection date, removing bias introduced by reporting delay issues;
- Transitioning to a “testing encounters” methodology to account for people who receive both a rapid and PCR test on the same day, and;
- Providing relevant technical notes directly on the data pages.
The main dashboard page will now provide more relevant summary statistics for testing, cases, and deaths. As the pandemic has changed, so too have the statistics of relevancy, placing a greater emphasis on moving averages, while also mirroring county criteria for case rate and testing measures.
The dashboard itself has a new look, too, making it easier to navigate to pages while searching for different information.
On the individual pages on the dashboard, the main shift in reporting focuses on the trends rather than daily numbers and the attribution of cases and tests to date of specimen collection.
This serves a multitude of purposes, including eliminating any biases due to reporting issues, added context to when transmission occurs, increased transparency on methodology, and working in unison on real-time county/location driven data.
Transitioning to a “testing encounters” methodology to account for people who receive both a rapid and PCR test on the same day will result in an overall decrease in the total reported number of tests by 3.8%. This is aligned with developing best practices across the states that have recently evolved as a result of new testing capabilities.
Improvements to the State’s dashboard will be on-going throughout the State’s sustained effort to monitor and adapt throughout the pandemic using a scientific based approach.
Transparent data will continue to drive the State’s decision making and relevant information will continue to be shared throughout.
