Tompkins County has had a relatively peaceful few weeks by pandemic standards, and people have been able to think about things beyond COVID-19 testing. However, as the virus is spreading rapidly through much of the United States, it’s clear we won’t be able to end this conversation any time soon. In particular, as Cornell “reactivates teaching” and Ithaca College reopens with a “staggered return”, public health data will matter much more to Tompkins County residents again.

News reports often present New York State and county public health data as just kind of appearing, and largely unquestionable. If you were only watching the state as a whole and your own county, it might look like a mostly well-oiled machine, following apparently strict patterns with occasionally mismatched numbers.

If you look at the state and the 62 counties as a whole, though, you would find that some counties provide vastly more detail than others, and only a few counties provide less detail than Tompkins County. (You can find all of them through this spreadsheet.) Even Tompkins County’s immediate neighbors mostly provide more information than Tompkins does. You’ll also find that the state’s numbers only occasionally match up with independently reported county numbers.

Tompkins County (population 102,793) provides basic testing information: the number of tests performed, the the number of results still pending, the number of positive results (167 this past Sunday), and the number of negative test results (15,193). They also provide a count of the number of people who have recovered (165), and information on hospitalized patients (0) and discharges (0). They also report deaths of county residents (0) and total non-resident deaths (2).

Beyond that, Tompkins County provides almost no other information about cases, except for occasional alerts when people working in close contact with the public test positive, such as cases at Wegmans, Mirabito in Lansing, and GreenStar. Once, on May 5th, they provided overall demographic information about the 154 people who had tested positive up to that point. If you’ve been following 14850.com’s daily reporting on the Health Department statistics, you’re probably very familiar with this explanatory paragraph, which has been in every update since April 8th:

We asked the Tompkins County Health Department about their choices to issue only countywide statistics, with no breakdown by municipality within Tompkins County. “We are respecting the privacy of the individuals first and foremost,” spokesperson Samantha Hillson told 14850 Today. “Additionally, because we are a small community and we have a relatively small number of cases we don’t want to create a perception that one part of our community is safer than others. The guidance continues to be for individuals to stay home unless they are an essential worker or in medical distress,” she says.

The Health Department’s position hasn’t changed, and the data they provide has only changed slightly. However, it’s clear from looking around at other counties that this is not a common position.

Very few counties provide less information than Tompkins County. Most of the counties with minimalist reporting approaches are in the North Country. The site for Clinton County (pop. 80,695) doesn’t provide numbers directly, pointing to the state’s numbers instead. Essex County (pop. 37,300) posts updates occasionally. Just south of the Adirondacks, Fulton County (pop. 53,591) has taken a similar approach. The biggest surprise for me is that Westchester County (pop. 967,612) does not appear to provide data directly on their site, also pointing to the state. It is clear from local reporting, however, that they provide maps and geographically detailed data to local media.

Even those counties at least occasionally provide detailed information beyond the core testing numbers. Last week, for example, Clinton County had a recent media conference that noted three recent cases. Erin Streiff, their Health Care Services Director, made clear that “Out of the past three cases that we have had reported to us, two of them we know are locally acquired. We do not know the exact source of they acquired it, but they did not have travel and they did test positive. One that we received did have travel… outside of the state.”

Tompkins County’s immediate neighbors all take slightly different approaches.

• Schuyler County (pop. 17,912) provides the basic data with an additional category for quarantine, as well as age ranges for people with positive tests.
• The public health page for Seneca County (pop. 34,300) has a regularly updated graphic with testing and quarantine data, as well as the age ranges and municipalities of people with positive tests.
• Cayuga County (pop. 77,145) doesn’t present a simple table, but provides a lot of information in press releases. Some of it is data, and some of it is details like “An Auburn Lowe’s employee who resides in an adjacent county tested positive for COVID-19 and was working on Monday, June 22, 2020. Members of the public who shopped at the Auburn Lowe’s on Monday, June 22, 2020 from 12:00pm – 9:00pm, should monitor themselves for symptoms of COVID-19 such as headache, scratchy sore throat, or fever for 14 days after the potential exposure.”
• Cortland County (pop. 47,823) provides data much like Tompkins, and supplements it with a potential community exposures page.
• Tioga County (pop. 48,560) presents its information in press releases. They have an additional category for “individuals who have had close contact (6 ft.) with someone who has tested positive, but is not displaying symptoms for COVID-19; or individuals that have traveled to China, Iran, Japan, South Korea, or Italy and is displaying symptoms of COVID-19.”
• Chemung County (pop. 84,254) provides the basic data as well as a graphic listing the age ranges and municipalities of people with positive tests.

One county west of Chemung, Steuben County (pop. 95,796) puts tremendous effort into making sure its residents know if they might have been exposed. In addition to a regularly updated map and dashboard, their press release archive, though all PDFs, pretty much tells the story of the virus’s spread through the county. This example from April shows how they reported how many cases had appeared in which municipalities, and also provided a list of locations and times where the virus might have spread:

3/22/20 –3/28/20 – B&D Stoves in Howard
3/23/20 or 3/24/20 Afternoon – Walmart in Hornell
3/26/20 Afternoon – Tops in Bath
3/26/20 –3/27/20 – Mountainbrow Townhomes in the City of Corning
3/26/20 –4/1/20 – Bluebird Trail Farm in Caton
4/1/20 Morning – Wegmans in Hornell

When nursing home residents died, they acknowledged it, though it took a while longer for details about which homes were affected to come out.

Larger counties have generally provided more data. New York City (pop. 8,336,817) has a complex set of detailed options, while Erie (pop. 919,719 including Buffalo) and Monroe (pop. 742,474, including Rochester) have dashboards. Both show maps indicating areas that have more or fewer cases. (Dashboards aren’t limited to large cities – Genesee (57,511), Orleans (40,612), and Wyoming (40,085) counties created a shared dashboard.)

Onondaga County (pop. 461,809, including Syracuse) has a dashboard, but even its regular reporting page includes many additional categories. They report the number of deaths inside and outside of nursing homes – currently 80 to 104 – as well as the presumed transmission route. Onondaga identifies senior facilities and other congregate settings, known contact to a positive case, travel, and two more critical categories: community acquired and unknown. Those last two are great indicators for how controlled the outbreak is. They also provide detailed breakdowns on hospitalization, age, race, and gender for the county as a whole and for the City of Syracuse.

As the fall semester comes into view, new challenges are emerging. Tompkins County residents, if not their economy, came through New York State’s spring wave of COVID-19 pretty well. The county ramped up testing, we stayed home, and things have calmed down — so far. Cornell has published plans for “reactivating”, and Ithaca College is expanding on its plans. Cornell’s plan is explicit about the need for testing students without symptoms, and makes it sound like they will be testing a vastly higher rate than the county has so far. Reactivation will also bring many interstate and perhaps international travelers. What kinds of data will help Tompkins County residents and students figure out how to calibrate their behavior to local risks?

Look through what other counties provide, and think about how it might apply to Tompkins County. If daily municipality-by-municipality data is too much, at least when there aren’t a lot of cases, maybe campuses and community would be helpful? Or perhaps also break out congregate care facilities? The many more tests given regularly to nursing home staff and soon to Cornell students will add to the testing numbers without necessarily reflecting testing of everyone else across the county, so it might be good to know that. If there are more cases, it might be a good idea to more regularly identify locations and times that might have seen exposures beyond what contact tracers can capture. Perhaps most important, some kind of community spread number, telling us how many cases have unknown origin, would tell us just how tightly we have the virus under control over time.

Simon St.Laurent has been on the web for a long time. He was the keeper of the Living in Dryden blog, and is 2nd Alternate on the Town of Dryden Planning Board, Vice Chair of the Varna Community Association, Chair of the Tompkins County Green Party, and a Content Manager at LinkedIn Learning.

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Related: Coronavirus coverage in 14850 Today