Hopkins University will beginning to update COVID-19 statistics once a day

Johns Hopkins University will update statistics on COVID-19 illnesses and deaths and vaccinations daily, rather than hourly, starting Sept. 21.

The U.S. and other countries have become less active in providing statistics, from which the university compiles an infographic on the global COVID situation. Now, in addition to deciding to update the data on the coronavirus daily, the university has decided to drop the COVID-19 test results reports. Experts have found that more and more tests are being used around the world by those who want to do the tests at home, and their results are not being tracked by authorities.

Since the beginning of the epidemic in the U.S., university researchers have relied on state and local health authorities for data, but over time, such information has become less publicly available. Most U.S. states provide data “on an intermittent schedule,” the newspaper said. Massachusetts, for example, updated its COVID-19 data weekly instead of daily in July. In light of this situation, the university has also decided that it will take information on vaccination rates from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rather than from local governments.

The university created a website dedicated to the coronavirus situation in January 2020, just as covid was beginning to spread around the world. The information collected by the university has been used by officials, researchers and ordinary citizens around the world, the newspaper notes. Since its inception, the site has been visited more than 800 million times.