Clark County Health Department's COVID-19 Dashboard

Sunday, November 8th, 2020 -- 10:57 AM

-The Clark County Health Department has recently launched a COVID-19 Data Dashboard.

I spoke with Kevin Smith and Dylan Brost, with the health department, and they discussed the dashboard in more detail.

Kevin:  “The dashboard can be found on the county website by going to the COVID-19 dashboard right on the county’s homepage.  There’s a lite version that’s cellphone friendly and then there’s a little more heavy duty version with more detail on that website.”

Question:  “And where does that information come from?  Does it come from the Health Department or does it come from the state?”

Kevin:  “The active cases are counted daily here by our Public Health Nurse.  So, that’s based on a running list of cases that we have internally.  The total number of lab confirmed cases, we are going to transition to using the state's numbers there.  Recovered cases are basically lab confirmed cases minus active cases and also minus the deaths related to COVID 19.  Most of the active cases are going to come from a hand count, right here at our local Health Department.”

Question:  “Who often do guys update the dashboard?”

Dylan:  “We get the numbers from our nurses and we update the dashboard daily.  We have to wait until the state posts their data daily.  So then we take data from the nurses and from the state and then post all that data to the dashboard.”

Question:  “What other data can people find on the dashboard?”

Kevin:  “One of our most commonly viewed graphs is the daily new cases and the daily active cases.  That graph is based on some basic epidemiology principles.  One would be prevalence, which is the current number of total cases, and then the new cases, that would be considered incidents.  That graph is showing some basic epidemiology principles that are describing how many new cases per day we’ve gotten and how many per day are currently active.  And that to us is one of the most telling graphs that we have because it’s really just a live ticker of what’s going on in the county with COVID-19.”

“We also have a map showing the number of active cases by municipality.  That is also an excellent tool for schools and other local community resource events to look at to see what’s going on right there in their backyard so they can help make informed decisions about how to hold events safely if there’s currently a high risk in that area and they want to postpone that until it looked like things had calmed down a little bit with COVID spread.  That map is an excellent resource and I think a lot of people are happy to see that.  We’re able to report what’s going on right in our backyard.”

Question:  “Why did the Health Department decide to put this particular dashboard together for Clark County?”

Kevin:  “That is a great question and a lot of it had to do with making sure our residents are well informed about what’s happening in our community, so they can make their own decisions.  We were getting a lot of questions and a lot of requests early on during the outbreak and we wanted to make sure that we had an up-to-date answer to those questions.  Rather than doing some Facebook posts that provided information here or there, we wanted to make sure everybody had all the relevant most important information so that they can understand what’s going on with COVID and, again, make those decisions.”

Question:  “Anything else you’d like people to know?”

Kevin:  “We do want people to be aware that COVID-19 is a serious infection.  And although not everybody shows incredibly severe symptoms, a lot more than average, we have a lot of these unfavorable outcomes with the number of deaths we’ve had this year so far. The high number of hospitalizations that people who have it, they need to seek that emergency care at the hospital.  We are one of the only counties that display outcomes after hospitalizations.  And that, to us, is a very telling indicator of hospital capacity, how well people who are admitted to the hospital are doing after they have treatment.  And that is a very telling and important indicator, which tells us if being admitted to the hospital is being taken lightly or taken serious and, of course, being admitted to the hospital is always a serious concern.”

“Also, from time to time, people seem to compare COVID-19 to the flu, and that is simply not the case. As far as we have on record in Clark County, we have not seen this many deaths caused by influenza in a similar time period, or as many hospitalizations from people who have influenza. COVID-19 is definitely more dangerous than the flu, and we have to respect that as a fact. Many people who get COVID-19 will recover or have mild to moderate symptoms, and that is also a fact. However, the death rate and hospitalization rate of COVID-19 is much higher than the flu and we don’t want anyone to overlook that. We need to treat this seriously so that we can prevent unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths in our community. A lot of people are taking this seriously in Clark County, though, and that is great. Remember these are our friends and neighbors, and their families that are depending on us to treat this as something that is much more dangerous than the flu. A little bit of extra precautions now can help us save a lot in the long run.”

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.