A new COVID-19 dashboard, for anyone interested in tracking local data associated with the coronavirus pandemic, was unveiled by the University of Hawaiʻi, Gov. David Ige and the Hawaiʻi State Department of Health (DOH).
The goal of the dashboard is to inform the community and policy makers on key action areas essential to stopping the pandemic: prevention, detection, containment, and treatment and healthcare.
“This dashboard is an all-hands-on-deck effort that aims to sync up multiple data sources into a single location. Our aspiration is to have data that are accurate, timely and granular to help make individual and public decisions through a collaborative partnership with data providers,” said Victoria Fan, associate professor in UH Mānoa’s Myron B. Thompson School of Social Work.
The new metrics include: ICU bed and ventilator use by COVID-19 patients, total number and percent of capacity; occupancy and capacity of isolation and quarantine facilities for those who cannot isolate or quarantine at home; contact tracing capacity and currently active/trained tracers, by county; testing capacity and turn-around time; personal protective equipment supplies and distribution; modes of transmission, with the number of cases and clusters for each; and mask-wearing behavior in Honolulu, with all Hawaiian islands in process.
Data for the dashboard is being pulled from multiple sources and will be updated daily or weekly, as the information becomes available. The dashboard will continue to be a collaborative process involving DOH and key partners, sharing timely and accurate information with the public.
“This is a tremendous step forward in providing vital information in an easy-to-read and understood format. It immediately improves our ability to provide key metrics about how Hawaiʻi is performing in our fight against COVID-19 and offers data to aid in decision-making,” Gov. Ige stated.
UH undergraduate and graduate students working as research assistants in the Pacific Health Analytics Collaborative (PHAC) with Fan have been designing and developing the dashboard for two weeks before the prototype was released. PHAC works to strengthen the pipeline of analytics capabilities of UH graduates in partnership with the DOH.
