VA's daily state-level respiratory indicators

[nmdefries]

Publicly available daily state-level respiratory indicators at https://www.accesstocare.va.gov/Healthcare/SeasonalDiseaseReview

Data details

Data questions from Roni:

• The CSV files list cumulative counts, presumably since the beginning of the season?
• However the curves list 7 day averages. I assume that's what you meant by scraping?
• Is a case assigned to the date on which the diagnosis was added to the record, or to the date on which the case was recognized and added to the surveillance report?
• Is data for previous seasons available as a time series (not just the final season count)? If so, how many seasons back?
• It mentioned that the CSV file is updated several times a day. Do the updates reflect only newly diagnosed cases, or also newly recognized cases? E..g are there sometimes up or down corrections to the review of older records?

Answers from data contact:

The curves are 7-day averages, but I am pretty sure that the output is counts. But yes, we don’t post the whole previous time series and so others have scraped. You are right in that this does not give you a way to get history. I will have to remind myself of what we did with data.gov.

In the background we have the whole time series back to at least 2020, but not on the website.

The download is the count for the day posted. There is some upshifting which will be reflected in the figures as data accumulate but that will not be reflected in the counts. Sorry about that.

I did forget that we were able to post by our parent facilities. There is some public-facing catchment-detailing data somewhere, I believe.

Additional context