Using the COVID-19 Data Dashboard – Helpful Hints

With the recent announcement of our COVID-19 dashboard enhancements, I’d like to share some tips and tricks for getting the most out of the dashboard. Our amazing dashboard team has created the ability to view the data in all kinds of different ways, some of which I’ll summarize below.

Summary page

You can now go straight from the Summary page to our most visited pages by clicking the symbol in the top right corner of some of the boxes.

Also, note that the “Number of New Cases reported today” is not reflective of the number of people newly sick with COVID-19 today. It’s actually telling you how many people were reported to public health with COVID-19 in the last day. If you want to see how many people became sick with COVID-19 on a given day, you’ll need to look at the COVID-19 Cases by Day section of our dashboard.

Filtering by county

Any page on the dashboard with a map of Arizona allows you to filter the data by county. If you click on a county, you can see data for just that county.

Showing weekly, monthly, or quarterly data

If, like me, you prefer to view weekly trends instead of daily trends, you can update the bar chart on several dashboard pages to show you weekly data. You can do this by hovering over the farthest left portion of the x-axis of the chart and clicking the small (-) sign that pops up. Clicking the (-) sign once will collapse the data from daily to weekly, clicking it twice will collapse the data to show it by month, and clicking it three times will collapse the data to show it by quarter. This can be helpful if you want to compare different weeks to one another or compare a month in 2020 to a month in 2021. I do this the most often on our COVID-19 Cases by Day and Laboratory Testing pages.

Determining current percent positivity

We use the percent of the diagnostic tests in Arizona that are positive as a measure of community transmission during a given time period. You may have noticed a couple of different measures of percent positivity on our dashboard. One, displayed on our Summary page and at the title of the percent positivity bar graph on our Laboratory Testing page, shows total percent positivity. That means it’s displaying the total number of positive diagnostic tests over the total number of all diagnostic tests performed in Arizona over the entire pandemic. This is a good overall metric, but if you want to know what’s happening in Arizona right now, you can visit the Laboratory Testing page and take a look at the bar graph at the bottom left of the page. This graph shows the percent of diagnostic tests that are positive each week. Looking at the most recent complete week will give you the best picture of the current percent positivity in Arizona.

These are just some of the ways you can interact with the dashboard, but hopefully, a helpful summary to enhance your experience.

By Jessica Rigler|2021-10-15T14:30:07-07:00October 15th, 2021|Preparedness|Comments Off

About the Author: Jessica Rigler

Jessica Rigler, an Arizona native, began her public health career more than 15 years ago, serving in varied roles with local, state, federal, and international public health agencies. Jessica has been with the Arizona Department of Health Services for over 12 years, supporting evaluation activities with the state immunization program, serving as the state’s first Healthcare Associated Infections Coordinator, and leading the Bureau of Epidemiology and Disease Control. She is currently an Assistant Director overseeing the Division of Public Health Preparedness at ADHS, which spans the areas of Epidemiology and Disease Control, Emergency Medical Services, Public Health Statistics, Public Health Emergency Preparedness and the Arizona State Public Health Laboratory. In recent years, Jessica has worked with the ADHS team to lead critical public health responses including opioids and COVID-19. Jessica holds Bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry and human development from the University of California, San Diego, and a Master’s degree in public health from Emory University. She is a Certified Health Education Specialist and certified in infection control.