USAFacts_Official

Thanks for your question! Comparing the US response to other countries becomes tricky for a few reasons.

1. Geographically, the US is enormous, and our government is largely decentralized. As a result, we see 50 different crises in 50 different states, and each state has the mandate to administer its response.
2. Our health/public health infrastructure, too, is incredibly decentralized. There are thousands of hospitals in hundreds of hospital systems, all of whom have different methods reporting information to their respective health officials. Coordination, as a result, becomes incredibly difficult, and what we end up losing is the ability to understand the crisis effectively (e.g., get real-time data on cases, hospitalizations, PPE availability).

USAFacts has developed an infrastructure to ingest the data as quickly and accurately as possible from 3000+ county health departments in the country. Still, our scope is limited to just that -- data collection. A lesson we are all learning for the future is that coordination by our governments in these circumstances is critical.

This is a great question -- we have kept our cumulative totals because it was how we first began to report the data. Both have their own utility, and we are working on incorporating this into an API so users can more easily get access to new cases per county.

The reason we are putting focus behind an API instead is because it's far more extensible and makes it much easier to iterate. Additionally, we have some products in the works right now that will focus on new cases as we move into a "Recovery" phase (although, of course, the nature of the pandemic remains unclear).

Thanks for your question!

We have Puerto Rico data that we collect for a variety of federal agencies making use of it. We haven't gotten around to publishing it quite yet because PR is a bit different in how it reports numbers compared to the 50 US states.

It's absolutely a priority to include in the near future -- we will need to wait for when we roll out our API because including it in our standard datasets will break backwards compatibility for many users.

We've been consistently surprised by how difficult it is to get consistent reporting from states and counties even at this stage in the crisis. It's easy to think that the CDC/NIH, etc. can enforce certain types of reporting, but their mandate of collecting + reporting data is actually quite limited.

Virginia has a truly impressive reporting system that tracks the daily data we are aggregating publicly as well as easy to use demographic, testing and hospitalization data. https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/surveillance-and-investigation/novel-coronavirus/