Data Notes for the Week of March 4

Read the Year in Review

If you’re new to the data snapshot, we publish a weekly summary of the status for each of our metrics (you can find past issues on our data and metrics page).

We have a new way we’ll be measuring our progress through the pandemic.

Earlier this week, we announced a new way to assess our progress through the pandemic, called Forward Dane: Updating Metrics in Light of Vaccination Progress.

Since the first person tested positive in Dane County for COVID-19 over a year ago, we have learned a great deal about how COVID-19 is transmitted and ways to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in our community. When the pandemic began, we developed metrics to help guide our local response to COVID-19. New COVID-19 infections per day, percent positivity, and the number of hospitalizations have been key in understanding the impact of COVID-19 on our public health and healthcare systems. We’ve learned that metrics, while critical in our understanding of our local epidemic, have some limitations. We need to adapt as the epidemic changes, and be flexible in the way we think about data related to COVID-19 as we learn more locally, nationally, and worldwide.

The updated Forward Dane document includes a new set of measures that emphasize vaccine dissemination and epidemiology. The measures in this new tool no longer have specific thresholds and have been replaced with a more flexible data framework that allows Public Health to adapt measures to the pandemic more rapidly. These new measures will be used as a guide as future decisions are made about public health orders.

This week’s Data Snapshot is a special “Year in Review” issue.

The Year in Review offers a snapshot of how the previous metrics, including cases, percent positivity, testing, lab timeliness and contact tracing, community spread, hospitalizations, and deaths, looked over the past year. The Year in Review also includes a sneak peek at where we’re going with new measures related to vaccination.