Cook County News Herald

Cook County announces changes to COVID-19 Hub site


Officials from the Cook County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) have announced several changes to the Cook County COVID-19 hub site, www.cookcountycovid19.org.

Beginning today, Cook County will publish a weekly update on Thursday afternoons that will include the following COVID-19 testing data:

– Cumulative cases: the total number of confirmed positive cases for Cook County based on local and state testing data.

– Cases in the last seven days: the number of newly confirmed cases in Cook County within the last seven days, based on local and state testing data.

– Fourteen-day case rate: the number of newly confirmed positive cases per 10,000 people in a 14-day range in Cook County, as reported weekly by the Minnesota Department of Health. This data is used by school districts, charter schools and local public health as one of the factors to help guide decisions about learning models during the pandemic.

– CMS positivity rate: the rate of positive cases in Cook County, as reported by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS). This data is used by local healthcare to make decisions regarding the frequency of tests for facility staff.

– Lab tests: the cumulative number of tests by county of residence.

– Cumulative test rate: the cumulative rate of tests by county of residence per 10,000 people.

– Deaths: the cumulative number of deaths by county of residence for Cook County.

Numbers include confirmed and probable cases where COVID-19 is listed on the death certificate or clinical history/autopsy findings that provide evidence that the death is related to COVID-19 without an alternative cause (i.e., drowning, homicide, trauma, etc.).

“These updates to the Cook County COVID-19 hub site reflect an effort to provide community members with current information about the spread of the virus in our community. Moving forward, we will be sharing the data points that are used in decision-making by local public health and our partners in healthcare and school administration,” said EOC Incident Co-commander and Public Health Supervisor Grace Grinager.

“While numerous individuals have asked for information on the number of ‘active’ cases, this is not a measure that we regularly use in public health because we cannot track the end of a person’s infectious period for COVID,” Grinager stated. “While we know what the minimum infectious period is, this is not accurate for everyone, so it is not a good population level statistic.

We also do not know all the active cases on a given day, as some people are infectious and haven’t been tested or received their test results yet.”

Since the launch of the Cook County COVID-19 hub site in March, people have visited the hub site more than 82,000 times, with an average of 500 visits per day.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.