Virginia’s health department to retire more COVID-19 dashboards, including cases by date reported

The Virginia Department of Health will lay more COVID-19 dashboards to rest starting Thursday, according to Rebecca Early, the director for informatics and information systems in the department’s office of epidemiology.

Four dashboards and two landing pages will go offline Thursday in an effort to streamline the data the department provides and to align the site with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dashboard, Early said.

The dashboards that will go down include federal vaccine doses, vaccines received, cases and deaths by date reported and cases by vaccination status, though users will be directed to the CDC dashboard for Virginia cases by vaccination status, she said.

Web traffic to the federal vaccine doses and vaccines received dashboards has dropped as vaccines become more available and since then, there has been “incremental” data fluctuations on the dashboards, Early said.

The VDH cases dashboard will still include information that will be useful even though the cases and deaths by date reported dashboard will be retired, she said.

COVID-19 symptom onset date and date of death are more useful for understanding what a community is facing compared to dates reported, which can often lag behind as the information comes in from disparate areas across the commonwealth, according to Early.

In March, VDH also made changes to the dashboards that consolidated information and retired some dashboards, according to a March 10 news release.

The landing pages being retired Thursday — level of community transmission and locality — have been down since March 15 and March 10 respectively though level of community transmission information can be obtained through the CDC dashboard and the locality information has been rolled into the VDH cases dashboard.

Early said the streamlining effort is meant to make sure useful data is as easy to find as possible for users with the fewest number of clicks.

COVID-19 cases are on the rise across the commonwealth and the U.S. The White House announced Tuesday the public can order eight more free at-home COVID tests through COVIDTests.gov. Those needing help ordering the tests can call 1-800-232-0233, according to the website.

A statement from the office of Governor Glenn Youngkin also said the dashboard retirements will help streamline the information the public wants and needs while aligning with the CDC website.

“COVID-related hospitalizations remain relatively low and deaths at near record lows,” said Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson for Gov. Glenn Youngkin in a Wednesday email. “We have ready supplies throughout the Commonwealth for vaccines, tests and treatment. So far, over 7 million Virginians have received the vaccine. The best way to protect yourself and your family is to get vaccinated - that has been and will continue to be the message from the governor.”