The City of Long Beach announced last Friday, April 10, that it is developing a new data dashboard to track coronavirus information for Long Beach.
The dashboard site will be available as soon as this week, according to the announcement. However, Kate Kuykendall, a spokesperson for the City’s Joint Information Center, told the Signal Tribune on Monday that though the site will be up soon, there is no exact launch date yet.
When it’s up, the dashboard will appear on the City’s www.longbeach.gov/COVID-19 website, Kuykendall said.
The data dashboard’s main purpose is to help the Health Department’s Communicable Disease Control Program (CDCP) focus on outbreak response, according to the announcement.
Data will include not only the numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, but it will be sorted by zip code and ethnicity, Kuykendall said.
“The goal of the new data dashboard is to provide factual information that helps keep the public informed about COVID-19 here in Long Beach,” Kuykendall said. “Once launched, we anticipate that it will be updated daily.”
Kuykendall added that the dashboard’s development team is working closely with the Health Department and includes staff from the Emergency Operations Center, Technology and Innovation Department, and the Office of Civic Innovation.
The dashboard will present information more dynamically than it has been so far to help focus the City’s response to the pandemic, Kuykendall said.
“The previous version of the data lived on a PDF rather than built into a website,” she said.
While Long Beach’s ethnicity data will provide a local lens on the problem, the State began releasing virus-related ethnicity data for California as of last week. The data covers 62% of COVID-19 cases and 86% of deaths statewide.
It shows that the numbers of COVID-19 deaths among Whites and Asians roughly mirror the percent of each in the state’s population– 41% for Whites and 17% for Asians– according to the State’s data as of April 12.
However, the number of Latino deaths represents only 28% of total deaths so far, though that group reflects 39% if the state’s population. Conversely, African Americans represent 6% of the population, yet they’ve suffered a disproportionate 10% of COVID-19 deaths.
Nationwide, African Americans represent one-third of all COVID-19 deaths and are 2.3 times more likely to die than would be expected based on their population, according to APM Research Lab, an independent research organization, in an April 14 report.
“While Black Americans represent 13% of those living in places releasing data by race, they have suffered 32% of all known COVID-19 deaths in those places,” APM reports, adding that ethnicity data is currently only available for about a third of total coronavirus deaths.
Locally, according to Census estimates, Long Beach is home to about 467,000 residents, who are 42% Latino, and 13% each African American and Asian, including a sizable Cambodian community.
Tom Modica, newly appointed city manager, stated in an April 13 memo to the mayor and city council that it’s difficult for Long Beach to gather ethnicity data because people are not required to provide that information when they sign up for a COVID-19 test.
Nevertheless, the City has found that 21% of those hospitalized in Long Beach are African Americans though they represent only 13% of residents, according to the memo.
“The virus most severely impacts those with underlying health conditions, such as asthma, diabetes and high blood-pressure and African Americans are overrepresented in the percent of those in Long Beach experiencing these conditions,” Modica stated.
Implicit bias in healthcare and other social determinants might contribute to those statistics, Modica said, including living in overcrowded housing, relying on public transportation and having limited access to testing and treatment.
“We plan to offer additional free drive-through testing sites in these communities to help identify when people are infected, better educate the community on physical distancing protocols, sanitation practices and quarantine/isolation protocols to slow the spread of the disease to those with underlying health conditions,” Modica said.
He added that the City will identify isolation sites for those who can’t isolate at home if they test positive for COVID-19.
Though federal law prohibits the City from releasing ethnicity or other data until there are at least five deaths in each category, Modica said the information will be released as soon as its available.
“[While] Long Beach and the County are requesting [ethnicity data] be added,” Modica said, “Long Beach is working to create its own testing website for local testing that can capture our own local data.”
