Definitely no more local - or at least state-level - COVID updates for a while

As noted earlier, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in its extremely finite wisdom, has decided to only update its COVID dashboard once a week. Since very nearly the beginning of the pandemic, I've been blogging the state numbers, trying to figure out trends and get a sense of where things were going. Making my own archive suddenly started making more sense back in January of 2021, when the state started posting things to a Tableau server instead of serving up daily PDF reports. A year ago, the state went from daily updates to a Monday-through-Friday schedule; on the other hand, the state was averaging less than a hundred new cases every day at that point. Of course, we quickly hit the Delta variant surge in September 2021, followed by the truly catastrophic first Omicron surge in December 2021 and January 2022, followed in turn by the not-quite-as-catastrophic second Omicron surge back in May.

Now we may or may not be looking at yet another surge in the Northeast (there certainly is one in the South and West of the country). But we're only getting a once-every-Thursday snapshot from the Commonwealth. Worse, it seems that the state is only sending updates to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once a week. I was looking into seeing if I could get daily (or even just Monday-through-Friday) updates from the CDC's data portal, but their United States COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by State over Time data set is showing zero new cases for July 9 through 13 and July 15 through today. (Here's the query I used, in case you really like looking at JSON output.)

All in all, it looks like there's no way for the foreseeable future that I'll be able to continue my daily (or even weekdayish) state level reporting. Which is irritating. My town is still updating their case information most days, so I'll probably keep tracking that, along with the CDC data feeds I've already been using. I'll just have to assume that the CDC's numbers for Massachusetts will likely be pretty stale by midweek.

Semilocal COVID update

( Wall-o-text )

As noted previously, I'm a lot more limited in what I can report on a daily basis now that the Commonwealth has gone to once-per-week updates. But it may be worth continuing to echo the CDC data, which will remain tucked away behind the cut tag for now. Scarily, as of the last update, well over half the population of the US lived in a county with a CDC COVID Community Level of High (1143 of 3223 counties, with 54.49% of the US population).

At least my local town is still updating daily-ish. The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 17 active and 3,718 cumulative cases as of July 17. In the most recent "newsflash style update" at 7PM on December 21, 2021, the town reported 1538 cumulative cases with 89 individuals in isolation, 1417 recovered and 32 fatalities.