COVID Tracker Retired

by Richard Murphy

May 11th marks the end of the Federal COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. This means that the emergency reporting requirements for organizations to report COVID-19 data have reverted back to pre-pandemic rules- meaning that some data sources will change and some data is not required to be reported at all. Many of these changes can be seen in the CDC’s update here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of-phe.html

Likewise, the NY Times, our source for COVID data, has ceased to continue its COVID Tracker project which means that the Sophron COVID Tracker will no longer have timely data to report. (You can see the NY Times article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/opinion/pandemic-virus-response.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) In response, the Sophron COVID Tracker has also been retired. What began as a simple dashboard to track data in our home state of Georgia at the county level, grew to also include nationwide data being consumed and displayed. This was one of our first projects for our Interns to take over and enhance during the early part of the pandemic. It was a great way to introduce them to many concepts surrounding automating data capture from various sources, data quality issues, dashboarding and graphing, and some advanced SQL. They learned how to use job schedules in Gitlab to run daily data capture and transformation pipelines, as well as how to use Apache Superset to build charts and dashboards based on SQL queries.

It was a good real-world data project that taught how to deal with ever-changing data types, fields, sources and new and interesting data quality issues.