Enhanced COVID-19 Dashboard Launched
MEDIA RELEASE
November 23, 2022
Southwestern Public Health Releases New Dashboard that Helps Community Assess COVID Risk
Rather than simply providing raw data, the dashboard now interprets that data and offers an assessment of risk to the local community
Today, Southwestern Public Health, the public health unit serving the 215,000 residents of Oxford County, Elgin County and the City of St. Thomas, is launching an enhanced COVID-19 dashboard. The new data tool not only showcases raw data, but also assesses the community’s COVID-19 risk associated with that data.
Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, dashboards were primarily the domain of epidemiologists and very few had taken a deep dive into the world of infectious disease data points.
That all changed in March 2020 when both governments and local public health units began publishing raw data related to test positivity, case demographics, wastewater signals, hospitalizations, and deaths in response to community demand for transparency.
“Since we launched Southwestern Public Health’s COVID-19 dashboard, more than 288,000 people have viewed its contents. The interest from the community was, and continues to be, very high. We don’t recall a time in our history that there was such an interest in the intricacies of the data that drives public health decision making,” says Kerry Bastian, epidemiologist with the region’s health unit.
“The enhanced dashboard will allow individuals and health system partners such as long-term care homes and hospitals, to more easily interpret their personal risk, or the risk of those they care for, and act accordingly, adds Bastian.
The new dashboard highlights four indicators: confirmed cases, percent positivity, new hospitalizations and active outbreaks, and whether the trend is toward increasing or decreasing numbers in those domains. It also introduces an overall risk assessment and labels that risk as low, moderate, high or very high.
The dashboard is updated weekly, on Tuesdays, and will be used by individuals as well as area health care providers who must adjust clinical IPAC protocols based on the level of risk in their surrounding communities.