Amelia Bellamy-Royds Oct 6, 2023

Alberta Health's updated respiratory virus dashboard was released last week & data is now being updated. A review.

First, the positive points:

  • It is useful to have data on all the viruses side by side, if only to emphasize how dominant Covid still is.
  • Many of the charts on the old dashboard had become useless because they were reporting cumulative data for the pandemic; they are now showing data per year starting September.

1/5

#CovidAB #Covid19AB #ABpoli

Respiratory virus dashboard

Interactive aggregate data on respiratory related cases in Alberta

Show threadAmelia Bellamy-Royds 

In what I assume is a political choice, the influenza numbers are always listed first, then Covid (AKA SARS-CoV-2) & RSV.

Flu & Covid are never on the same scale, but at least the charts are now consistent (last year, the flu dashboard was reporting weekly numbers while Covid was showing daily counts).

For multi-year trend charts, sometimes there's a note about reporting changes for Covid, sometimes not. And sometimes they just skip the long-term Covid chart, as for total confirmed cases.

2/🧵

Oct 6, 2023 at 5:24pmWeb
Show threadAmelia Bellamy-Royds Oct 6, 2023

The hospital numbers ("severe outcomes" tab) remain the best we've got for tracking long term trends for severe respiratory infections (although reduced screening at admission means we'll catch fewer incidental infections or unusual presentations).

There's no longer a current total number of patients in hospital, though. The weekly new admissions is better for measuring recent disease severity trends, but the total is important for tracking the burden on the healthcare system!

3/🧵 #Covid19AB

Show threadAmelia Bellamy-Royds Oct 6, 2023

The test positivity page has lots of new information, with data on all viruses in a typical respiratory panel, and comparisons against historical seasonal trends (flu & RSV currently on track, Covid high).

What's missing: An acknowledgement that these aren't independent numbers. % for one virus will drop as other illnesses surge — but only if all tested together. If full-panel tests are only run after Covid & flu are negative (seems likely from test counts), % positivity will be inflated.

4/🧵

Show threadAmelia Bellamy-Royds Oct 6, 2023

The wastewater page is currently only showing Covid data, duplicating the main wastewater dashboard, but with the convenience of multiple locations on one chart — er, 2 charts: the "population normalized" measure requires a very different scale for the tourist towns of Banff & Jasper!

The Covid variant chart introduced last year remains useless by grouping any strain with less than 5% of the current week into an amorphous other category taking up half the chart.

5/5

COVID TRACKER

Centre for Health Informatics Covid-19 Tracker

Show threadBrendan B.Oct 6, 2023
@AmeliasBrain I was reading an article on reformulating Influenza vaccines to account for B/Yamagata essentially going extinct thanks to pandemic restrictions. One suggestion was to rebalance quadrivalent vaccines to do 3 A Types and one B type instead of being equal between A/B and that graph definitely seems to support that.