Like a lot of people, I’ve been trying to track the progress of the COVID spread locally and been pretty frustrated by the lack of relevant information. Everyone is reporting number of positive COVID tests and number of deaths. These are easy to count and report, but the number of infections is irrelevant because of the lack of widespread testing of the general population. Number of deaths is a lagging indicator. Neither number gives any information regarding if the local healthcare system is being overwhelmed or not, and there’s no way to truly know if social distancing and citywide shutdowns are being effective at flattening the curve.
Without relevant information, it’s pretty easy for people to ignore shelter in place orders, and for Trump to make the argument that the overall economy is more important than a few sick people.
A more relevant measure would be "ICU bed capacity / current ICU bed occupancy" and "ventilator total capacity / ventilators currently in use" by state or big city or whatever.
I know that's probably not going to be easy to find or keep updated, but those are the numbers that are really important since they indicate if the local system is being overwhelmed or not, and that's directly related to the flattening the curve shutdowns that everyone is being asked to do.
“Days of PPE inventory” for healthcare workers at major hospitals would also be important, especially if it's at negative numbers because of shortages. That would indicate the effectiveness of the government's response in getting supplies where they're needed and might indicate if the federal government is prioritizing some states over others for non-medical reasons.
If anyone knows of a source reporting these numbers, or how to assemble the data for them, please leave a comment.
In the meantime, these are the dashboards I’ve been watching:
Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard / Interactive Map
nCoV2019.live — I like this one to quickly check a few states where relatives live
HealthMap — shows a timeline with weekly increases
NBC New York — also has an interesting timeline map
BBC — Info and data visualizations
NYTimes — Info and maps (might be outdated)
NextStrain — shows a breakdown of the genome and how it has spread
US Health Weather Map — Kinsa’s network of Smart Thermometers (not specifically COVID related)
WHO Coronavirus Information Page
The header image is a chart from CovidActNow.org It’s a prediction based off of certain scenarios, but it lacks any real-time data with actuals overlaid. It also only reports hospital beds, not ICU specific beds.