Federal race and ethnicity COVID-19 data isn't comprehensive enough to accurately represent the pandemic experience in the U.S., reports The COVID Tracking Project.
The COVID Tracking Project, which stopped reporting data March 7, says the federal datasets in some cases match well with its own previous compilations, but certain data series either diverge for complex reasons or cover only a portion of what the Project's datasets attempted to include.
The CDC provides cases and death data at the national level, but geographic information is only provided in restricted-access line-level data, which is usable only by people with the ability to analyze 21 million data points, or at the state level for deaths only in the National Center for Health Statistics' provisional death counts. All work that refers to information in the restricted access dataset is required to make the following disclaimer: "The CDC does not take responsibility for the scientific validity or accuracy of methodology, results, statistical analyses or conclusions presented."
No federal testing and very little hospitalization data includes race and ethnicity information, and no federal vaccine data includes race and ethnicity information except at the national level and in an incomplete form, reports the Project.
"The federal data available today is not sufficient," according to The COVID Tracking Project. "It's not possible to tell from outside the data-producing agencies how much of the race and ethnicity information we are seeking is internally available but not published, and how much simply hasn't been collected."
The Project recommended officials collect and publish more comprehensive race and ethnicity data; present data in clear, accessible ways; report race and ethnicity categories in a consistent way; and be transparent about data sources and contexts.
The Project noted that its own data has always been incomplete and shown inequities in who is being affected by the pandemic and to what degree.
For the charter of the newly assembled federal COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, click here.
Becker's reached out to the CDC for comment, but didn't receive a response at the time of publication.