Texas Medical Center streamlines COVID-19 data dashboard

Texas Medical Center will begin updating its daily COVID-19 dashboard with more streamlined information designed to clarify trends and present a clear picture to the public as to the state of the coronavirus pandemic in Greater Houston, officials announced Oct. 1

The medical center has been collecting data since early April on metrics such as reproduction rate, testing trends, number of overall positive cases and ICU bed capacity, among other topics.

The update seeks to remedy the unwieldy size of some of the aggregated data by the medical center, such as the trend of the COVID-19 daily case growth in the Greater Houston area, where daily case counts have grown difficult to read because of over four months of data crammed onto a single slide, said Isaac Middleton, Texas Medical Center’s chief operating officer.

Instead, new daily cases will be color-coded by month, with a zoom-in window on the daily counts for the last 30 days. A similar format will be used on testing metrics.

“We felt that providing the last 30 days in a granular way lets you engage in that data,” Middleton said.

The updated dashboard also includes delineating backlogged cases released by the Texas Department of State Health Services and newly reported cases.

The same format is being applied to testing metrics.

Positivity trends across Greater Houston have been combined onto one new slide, tracking separate lines of positivity reported by state data, Harris County, city of Houston and Texas Medical Center for the last 14 days.

The data dashboard update was capped off by cautionary statements during the press conference from TMC leadership, who advised that though case numbers are flat, the medical center is in a “rough steady state.”

“Let’s not give up on the things that got us to where we are today,” said Dr. Mark Boom, president and chief executive officer of Houston Methodist, a member institution of the medical center. “We have to be vigilant.”