To provide Santa Barbara County residents information needed to mount an effective COVID-19 relief effort, the county has created a new community data dashboard.
The product of a public-private partnership consisting of many county departments and community agencies, the dashboard displays local COVID-19 information such as surveillance metrics, status reports, and state and community metrics. A new addition of this dashboard is its interactive data charts displaying testing, cases, and health care capacity by place, time period, and demography.
During Tuesday’s meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, county assistant CEO Terri Maus-Nisich remarked, “The charts and graphs really do help tell the local story of COVID-19 and will help provide our residents with an opportunity to view the data so they can make the best informed decisions of their personal health and welfare decisions.”
According to a press release, the partnership that produced the dashboard is the result of a steering committee facilitated by LegacyWorks.
The dashboard features many tabs showing different categories of COVID-19 data. The overarching “status” tab shows Santa Barbara County’s current status and what it needs to do in order to move into a less-restrictive tier. As LegacyWorks founder and CEO Carl Palmer said while demonstrating the new dashboard during Tuesday’s meeting, the “status” tab will be updated with local data daily and every Tuesday with new data from the state.
Other data categories on the dashboard of data include “cases,” “geography,” healthcare,” “demographics,” and “community.”
The dashboard can be viewed online at the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department website, at https://publichealthsbc.org/data/.
The Santa Barbara County Public Health Department reported 32 daily cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday, a plurality of them located in Orcutt. Two previously identified cases were removed, bringing the county’s number of total identified cases up to 10,260. There were no COVID-19 deaths reported on Tuesday.
According to Public Health director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso, Santa Barbara’s seven-day rolling sum of new COVID-19 cases increased by 183% between Oct. 19 and Nov. 2. COVID-19 cases in Isla Vista, on the other hand, have experienced a diametric trajectory, decreasing by 68% during the same two week period.
Despite efforts to move into the orange tier, Santa Barbara County remains in the red. The county’s adjusted case rate of 4.3 and its unadjusted number of new cases per day per 100,000 population, 4.6, are both red tier-qualifying. Its positivity rate of 1.8% qualifies for the yellow tier, and its health equity metric of 2.8% qualifies for the orange tier.
In order to qualify for the orange tier, the county’s adjusted case rate has to be somewhere between one and 3.9.
Dr. Do-Reynoso said that the state of California is experiencing an increasing trend in new COVID-19 cases, as well as the greater United States.
“Worldwide the virus is spreading more rapidly than at any other point. The U.S. and Europe are both setting records for new confirmed cases,” she said.
email: jgrega@newspress.com
