||| FROM STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH |||
OLYMPIA — Washington State Department of Health (DOH) has added new data about testing and healthcare system readiness trends to the COVID-19 data dashboard.
These enhancements include adding:
- Antigen tests to the testing tab (currently the testing tab only includes molecular tests)
- Percent positivity and testing rate to the testing tab
- Percent hospital occupancy and percent ICU occupancy by COVID-19 patients to the healthcare system readiness tab
The metrics reported on the data dashboard allows the state, health care professionals, and the public to determine whether severe outcomes are going up, down, or remaining stable. This helps to monitor overall disease activity in the community, impact of vaccinations, impact of new variants, and a myriad of other important surveillance regarding COVID-19 in our state.
DOH and Microsoft’s AI for Health team partnered to create the interactive data dashboard. It launched April 3, 2020 to communicate trends and data in a way that is easier for the public to understand. Since then, DOH has made continuous improvements to the type of data reported and the way it is presented. In June, DOH added rate information for cases, hospitalization, and deaths.
DOH updates the data dashboard every Monday-Friday, with the following exceptions:
- Federal and state holidays (e.g., December 25, January 1)
- COVID-19 vaccination data is updated on alternate weekdays (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays).
The DOH website is your source for a healthy dose of information.
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