VDH Streamlines its COVID-19 Dashboard

(RICHMOND, Va.)—  The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) announced today that several changes are being made to its COVID-19 dashboards. The changes are intended to streamline the information that is most helpful in tracking COVID-19 and its impacts on Virginia at this point in the pandemic. These changes will better highlight current COVID-19 trends in Virginia and inform action.

“Throughout the pandemic, we added more data points and different visualization tools to help the community better understand the impact of COVID-19,” said Acting State Health Commissioner Colin M. Greene, MD, MPH. “With COVID-19 cases continuing to decline, and many communities relaxing restrictions, we are consolidating and focusing on the metrics that matter the most in this new phase of the pandemic. In addition, to provide more meaningful information, we have added a feature to several dashboards allowing the selection of the last 3, 6, and 12 months of data, instead of providing only cumulative statistics.”

The changes include two dashboard retirements, one dashboard with notable changes, five with minor changes, and four with a new reporting schedule.

Dashboards that are being retired or consolidated into other pages:

• Case and Testing Data by Zip Code: The corresponding dataset available on the Virginia Open Data Portal will continue to be updated weekly.
• Locality: Most of the data previously located on the locality page will now be available on the Cases Dashboard. Hospitalizations and deaths by report date have been discontinued on this page. The corresponding dataset is available on the Virginia Open Data Portal and will continue to be updated Monday through Friday.

Notable changes will impact the Cases dashboard:

• This page now shows Cases by report date (previously on Locality dashboard) Hospitalizations by event date (date of hospital admission) has been removed as a filter.
• Weekly cases (by date of illness onset) and deaths (by date of death) can now be viewed at the locality, health district, health region, or state level; date range selection has been expanded (past 13 weeks, past 26 weeks, one year, all reporting).

Dashboards with minor changes include the Demographics, Health Equity, Outbreaks, Variants, and VHHA Hospitalizations pages. For more detailed information about the changes on each dashboard, please view the Website Change Log. VDH is also considering changes to its Community Transmission dashboard to align with CDC’s new Community Levels. VDH is in the process of ensuring that CDC’s new model is reflecting Virginia COVID-19 data correctly, and updates will be available soon.

The Vaccine dashboards will have a new reporting schedule. This set of four dashboards will report five days a week (Monday – Friday). These dashboards were previously updated daily.