El Paso County Public Health updates COVID-19 data and vaccine dashboards

Data reflects current phase of the response

El Paso County, CO – El Paso County Public Health (EPCPH) published a series of visual metric updates to its COVID-19 data and vaccine dashboards. Effective today, the COVID-19 data dashboard and COVID-19 vaccine data dashboard will be combined into one dashboard and updated weekly on Tuesdays by 5 p.m. These updates make it easy for people to view trends in cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccination data in one convenient location. EPCPH will continue to provide updates on these disease metrics as part of the routine monitoring of COVID-19 in El Paso County communities.

“Local data is crucial to monitor progress and to be able to demonstrate and evaluate the impact of interventions,” said Susan Wheelan, director of El Paso County Public Health. “For example, 71.4 percent of eligible El Paso County residents have been vaccinated, which has tremendously helped reduce the risk of severe illness, including hospitalizations and deaths. Our data dashboard will continue to evolve as our response has.”

EPCPH is committed to continuous quality improvement, and the latest iteration of the dashboard is part of ongoing efforts to refine and improve data visualizations. Additional dashboard changes are listed below:

• Death rates per 100,000 for the 10 most populated counties in Colorado are now available on page three of the data dashboard, to provide additional perspective on death data.
• Removal of the following pages from the data dashboard:
  • Incidence and test positivity pages
    • This is due to the fact that both incidence and test positivity are heavily impacted by the increased utilization of at-home test kits, which ultimately yields less accurate information as it relates to these two metrics.
  • Regional hospitalizations page
    • At the direction of local hospitals, the regional hospital census data will no longer be available. This is primarily due to COVID-19 representing the same or less impact on hospital operations compared to other respiratory diseases circulating in the community.
    • Note, hospitalization admissions data will still be available both as cumulative admissions and daily admissions on page two of the dashboard.
• Removal of the following pages from the vaccine dashboard:
  • Doses administered and daily average doses, including a breakdown by vaccine, provider, dose and demographics.
    • While this information offered helpful insight during the initial phases of the vaccine rollout, these data points are less impactful at this point in the response, as doses (including boosters) have been widely available for the past year.

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