The Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) recently announced changes to its COVID-19 dashboard to reflect new publishing schedules and additional surveillance tools.
The COVID dashboards at www.coronavirus.in.gov will be updated each Wednesday by 5 p.m. The IDOH says this change reflects a national shift to evaluating weekly metrics rather than daily case counts and will ensure that trends in COVID-19 activity remain available to the public and healthcare providers to help inform decisions.
The IDOH said in a news release, “Breakthrough case counts and hospitalizations have been removed from the vaccine dashboard at www.ourshot.in.gov and from the youth dashboard in recognition of the fact that the widespread use of at-home tests, new variants and updated vaccines no longer provide a clear picture of breakthrough cases.”
The IDOH also has added a new wastewater surveillance dashboard that shows the results of SARS-CoV-2 tests conducted on untreated wastewater. Since people infected with the virus can shed it in their stool even if they do not have symptoms, wastewater surveillance can serve as an early warning that COVID-19 is spreading in a community, according to the IDOH.
“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made changes to our dashboards to ensure we are providing information that most accurately reflects the current situation so that individuals and communities can take steps to protect themselves and their families,” said State Health Commissioner Kris Box, M.D., FACOG. “These adjustments allow us to better evaluate COVID-19 activity in communities at a time when many cases go unreported due to the high use of home tests.”
In addition to the changes to the COVID-19 dashboards, the IDOH has shifted to weekly updates of its monkeypox dashboard at https://monkeypox.health.in.gov to reflect declining case counts.
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