The COVID Tracking Project
| Details | COVID-19 testing, racial disparities |
|---|---|
| Topics | Health, COVID-19, race, equity |
| Source | The COVID Tracking Project |
| Years Available | 2020 |
| Geographies | State, Nation |
| Public Edition or Subscriber-only | Public Edition |
| Download Available | yes |
| For more information | https://covidtracking.com/ |
| Last updated on PolicyMap | see data description |
Description:
The COVID Tracking Project is a nation-wide volunteer effort that started at The Atlantic. This project posts daily data updates on COVID-19 testing by state, assembled from data reported by state public health agencies and offices. The quality of the data reported varies by state. The COVID Tracking Project assigns letter grades to each state assessing the quality of the data reported by that state. Visit https://covidtracking.com/data to see each state’s grade.
PolicyMap calculated testing rates using population estimates from the 2014-2018 ACS. PolicyMap calculated the percent of tests that were positive over the last week, percent of tests that were negative over the last week, and number of tests results reported over the last week. Inconsistencies in reporting positive test results and total test results by state authorities occasionally caused percents to be larger than 100. PolicyMap suppressed these values, and also suppressed percents where the denominator was less than 10. Sudden unexpected peaks in percents positive or negative also may have resulted from changes in reporting practices by the individual states. Visit the Covid Tracking Project documentation page to read more about the reporting history of specific states.
Data on racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths was collected as part of a collaboration between The COVID Tracking Project and the Boston University Center for Anti-Racism. The researchers collected data on race and ethnicity of people diagnosed with COVID-19 and those who died of COVID-19 directly from state departments of public health. Because of variations across states in racial and ethnic categories, it is not always advisable to compare case or death rates of a given race or ethnicity with their prevalence within the local population. PolicyMap suppressed racial and ethnic population data for states flagged by the source as incomparable. Population data is from ACS 2014-2018 5-year estimates. Race and ethnicity categories are not mutually exclusive.