After two years, we’re ending our daily COVID-19 case updates. Here’s why
It started without any clear vision.
Certainly, we never expected it to last two years.
But on March 14, 2020, as information on Idaho’s first few cases of COVID-19 was rolling into the newsroom, we decided to compile what we knew about each of them into one file. The readership was immense.
So we kept at it, updating the file every day — in the early months, many times per day.
It was a service that provided information you couldn’t get anywhere else — how many new COVID-19 cases were reported today, in every county in the state? We scoured data on seven public health districts’ websites to compile those numbers at a time when the state of Idaho’s data gathering was unable to keep up.
And for many months, the readership on what we call the “What we know file” showed us how valued that information was. In two years, the several versions of that file (they eventually got too long and wouldn’t function correctly in our system) generated well over 1.5 million pageviews. And many of those readers, our data tells us, became digital subscribers to the Idaho Statesman, even though the numbers files were free to all.
I am tremendously proud of what we were able to do to provide this information in a unique way — a project that involved many people from across our newsroom. Sports reporter Rachel Roberts led the effort for much of the pandemic. Another sports reporter, Michael Lycklama, developed our graphics. Breaking news reporter Ian Max Stevenson took over the effort in recent months, while many others contributed to fill days off, weekends and even holidays.
I’m also tremendously thankful to the readers who followed along, supported us as we reported numbers in real time on Twitter and became subscribers. The support we experienced from our community during the economic challenges of the pandemic got us through a scary time.
Now, it’s time for us to close out this daily effort to track the COVID-19 numbers. We’ve been discussing for a while when would be the right time to stop, knowing that some folks will be disappointed to see it go. But with Idaho hitting the two-year anniversary of its first reported COVID-19 case on Sunday, the test positivity rate dropping below 5% and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removing the mask recommendation for the Treasure Valley, this seems like the time.
Plus, it’s been clear for quite some time that case numbers are not the greatest indicator of where we stand with COVID-19 (at-home tests aren’t accounted for, data backlogs cloud the true stats, etc.) — and, in fact, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has hinted that it soon could stop providing the numbers on a daily basis, too. There’s also the fact that the void we were filling at the beginning of the pandemic has become less of a factor as IDHW has vastly improved its data reporting throughout the past two years.
“It’s just not making sense to count every case anymore,” Dr. Kathryn Turner, Idaho’s deputy state epidemiologist, said earlier this year. “(The virus) is out there. Everybody knows it. Knowing whether or not there’s 2,100 cases a day or 2,103 cases a day doesn’t make a lot of difference in policy action.”
We still will, for as long as it’s warranted, produce our weekly story on the latest trends with COVID-19 in Idaho. That story publishes Friday evenings at IdahoStatesman.com and Sundays in the newspaper. And we’ll still be covering COVID-19 issues frequently.
But if you’re looking for a daily snapshot of where we stand, we recommend a visit to IDHW’s dashboards for COVID-19 and vaccination data.
“The case counts are something that we eventually think we will move away from,” Dr. Christine Hahn, Idaho’s state epidemiologist, said recently. “We’ve been talking about this for a while that, like influenza, if this becomes a seasonal virus down the road, that we would probably move away from counting every case and really focus on the burden on hospitals, burden in communities, outbreaks in congregate settings, that kind of thing.
“The new CDC indicators are a step in that direction. As you’ve heard, they do continue to incorporate cases per 100,000 as part of what they’re looking at, but starting to shift our attention to community burden as far as infrastructure, how are the hospitals doing, how are our health care systems holding up. I think that’s the way that we’re headed.”
