Local COVID-19 updates, or lack thereof anytime soon

Today, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ... completely changed the way their Daily Dashboard works - again. Now, instead of providing a downloadable PDF file with the day's information, they've published what purports to be an interactive dashboard "powered" by Tableau. I put "powered" in quotation marks because this dashboard has been remarkably slow to load (when it loads at all), with a bunch of broken image links and repeated popups stating "An unexpected error occurred. If you continue to receive this error please contact your Tableau Server Administrator."

That being said, the state claims to still be providing the underlying data - only now, instead of a ZIP archive containing various independent files, they're now providing a single spreadsheet with multiple tabs? (Oh, and the URL for today's spreadsheet? Still has last year: https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-raw-data-january-4-2020/download) Anyway, that change rather comprehensively breaks the code I'd been using to generate my own daily reports. I'll try and get something out later tonight, but I first have to figure out where the hell they hid the data this time....

Local COVID-19 updates

The state's new COVID-19 Interactive Data Dashboard is down hard, with the following apologetic note:

PLEASE NOTE: Due to high volumes of web traffic, some users have experienced difficulty accessing today’s COVID-19 Dashboard. We are working quickly to address this issue and we expect to re-post the dashboard soon. We thank you for your patience.

Meanwhile, I've been able to figure out at least some of the new spreadsheet format. No automated processing yet, but I can say that as of 5PM today, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is reporting 60 new confirmed deaths from COVID-19 (down 43% from yesterday), 4,358 new confirmed cases (up 40% from yesterday) and 55,570 molecular tests (up 24% from yesterday). The seven-day average positivity rate is 8.50%, up from 8.42% yesterday.

Rises in cases and test positivity are never, in my not terribly humble opinion, good things. (Broken data sources aren't good, either, but at least that's relatively easy to fix. And, yes, that URL with "2020" is in fact the one the state is providing for today's raw data.)

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 49 active and 544 cumulative cases as of January 3; it apparently has not been updated since yesterday. The most recent "newsflash style update" at 9PM on December 15 reported 433 cumulative cases with 63 individuals in isolation, 345 persons recovered and 25 fatalities.