Westchester County Launches Coronavirus Dashboard

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY — Westchester County has changed the way it provides information to residents about the local coronavirus pandemic.

County officials stopped providing a map of the county with active and cumulative cases last week to deal with ongoing time lag problems. County officials had explained from the start that the delay between when cases were reported to the state and when the state passed the data to Westchester created a time-lag issue with the numbers.

They suspended sharing the community breakdown map on Dec. 18 while trying to get additional and more accurate information to share.

"Our goal is to have the map more closely align with the New York State Tracker," they said on Facebook.

Now the new COVID information Dashboard is available online.

It's a format similar to Rockland County's, which offers three dashboards to track cases locally.

It's linked to current New York state information on total cases and active cases, and it offers more information for those who want an overview. Active cases are available overall and by municipality. New info includes new positives and fatalities. It even has a test site finder.

County Executive George Latimer said he would like to add hospitalizations and fatalities statistics by community.

New York State health officials have not released that information to the public in the past 10 months.

County officials in Westchester as in Rockland have grappled not only with time lags but with a wish to confirm residency of reported cases. The state's data often includes records with incomplete or inaccurate addresses.

At his bi-weekly Covid-19 briefing, Latimer said: “This codifies data we receive from New York State. We are trying, and have proven over an extended period of time, that we intended to do the things we say we are going to do. When we say that we are going to try to give you information in a more transparent and accessible way - this is an example of how we deliver it.”

The new Covid-19 Dashboard, which will automatically update, contains:

• County Active Case Map
• Covid-19 Test Site Map
• Total Confirmed Active Cases
• Total Confirmed New Cases
• Active, New & Cumulative Cases by Municipality
• Total Fatalities
• Total Persons Tested
• NYS Designated Hot Zones
• Positivity Rate
• Various Graphs Outlining Statistics