BRAZOS COUNTY, Texas — The Brazos county health district is ceasing operations of its COVID-19 dashboard.
But what does this mean for the efficiency of getting these numbers?
Well in just a few days the dashboard will be no more and if you'd like to dive deep into the data of the pandemic and how it's impacting Brazos county. Those numbers will only be found on the DSHS dashboard. This will be your way of tracking important COVID information.
”Clearly we can’t keep up with the number of cases that are available to do case investigations the way that we were able to,” said, Dr. Seth Sullivan, infectious disease physician and alternate health authority of Brazos County.
Now two years into the COVID-19 response, Dr. Sullivan doesn’t want this transition to send the wrong message.
“This is not about giving up I wouldn’t want to convey to anybody that this is not important that this is not something that we shouldn’t be tracking,” added Sullivan.
Local labs will now report all data using a system known as the national electronic disease surveillance system created by the CDC.
“A surveillance system that labs report into so this is the repository of information of data that DSHS has to pull from,” shared Sullivan.
Although DSHS will still update the community if needed. Dr. Sullivan admits community members will lose visibility of in-depth tracking when it comes to gender, age, and ethnicity.
”This is important to understand and identify changes in those patterns so as epidemiologists we seek to understand who, where, why, and when diseases occur, we only know the answers to those questions through the tracking,” said Rebecca Fischer, epidemiology professor for Texas A&M.
Moving forward, the health department will continue to investigate trends to share information as they see fit and make further changes to the process if needed.
“Right now, our dashboard is just not accurate," said Sullivan. "And it can’t be accurate you know moving forward you know is there another way of representing what we have learned of course, and we’re going to need to remain nimble,”
The dashboard will go offline, Monday, Jan. 24.
Following this, the health department says their website will provide a linkto the DSHS dashboard.