Vermont’s latest town-by-town Covid data shows encouraging signs for the battle against the pandemic.
In fact, the numbers are so good that VTDigger will no longer publish weekly town data updates. (More on that further down in this article.)
What’s the good news in the numbers?
For one thing, they show a new record since the latest surge began in the fall: No communities are reporting the highest category of case growth, which is more than 80 cases per 10,000 people in a two-week period.
An increasing number of communities, meanwhile, are in the lowest category of case growth, with less than one recent case per 10,000.
Even in the biggest cities, numbers are sparse. Burlington has added only five cases in the past two weeks. Bennington has added nine. Rutland has added 13.
Equally encouraging is new data from the Department of Health showing communities’ vaccination rates.
The health department has cautioned that low vaccination rates should be taken with a grain of salt, since the way people log their mailing address on vaccination forms may not perfectly correspond to where they actually live.
(It’s not a new problem: Vermonters pointed out that issue with the case map in the fall, and the health department now confirms the physical address of cases when it contacts people.)
Still, it’s worth noting that many communities already have a reported vaccination rate of 80% or more, the governor’s threshold for reopening. Chittenden, Washington, Lamoille and Grand Isle counties as a whole have already met that threshold.
Note from Erin Petenko:
When I began publishing town data in the spring, and when I restarted in the fall, cases were surging, and we thought it was important to give readers an idea of where outbreaks were happening and their individual community’s risk level.
For example, my story highlighting Barre’s surge in cases was inspired by following the numbers week-to-week and noticing when cases doubled in just one week. It also showed how the brunt of Covid cases in March and April were felt by communities in northern Vermont.
I’ve felt a personal connection to the numbers, too, as a Vermonter and a reporter covering the human effects of the pandemic. I’ve cried watching cases and deaths go up, and cheered as they went down in recent months.
I’ve spent a lot of time working on these numbers, which represent the only health department data published as an image. That’s a poor choice for transparency and accessibility, in my opinion as a data journalist, because it makes the numbers harder to examine and excludes many people who are visually impaired. For journalists like me to make the numbers more accessible to the public, I’ve gone through a process of converting the images into spreadsheets and carefully fixing any errors added through that process.
But the good news is that the numbers are less newsworthy now. With lowering cases and rising vaccinations, cases are not driving state decisions in the same way anymore, and there’s less for us to report on.
That said, I’ll still keep a close eye on this data, as with all the Covid data, and report on news should it occur. I have also archived the health department maps going back to December and will continue to do so if any curious data fans or dedicated readers would like to dig in.
And as always, you can check out the Vermont Department of Health map if you’d like to see how cases compare to your community’s population. A small tip for viewing it: If you click on the image directly, on most browsers you can zoom in more closely to find your community on the map.
