Our good friend Gavin Rozzi demonstrates in his publication today how New Jersey falls short with Covid-19 data. To the surprise of nobody- NJ is failing to adequately publish raw data related to Covid cases. Gavin explains it better himself below.

“In this post I will explore how New Jersey compares to neighboring states in terms of the granularity, format and accessibility of raw data about COVID-19 cases and deaths made available to the public during the pandemic’s outbreak in 2020. I conclude that New Jersey is failing to adequately publish raw data on COVID-19 cases for use in research and journalistic reporting, falling short compared to others in the tri-state region.

By “raw data” I mean structured data, either in CSV, Excel, an API, or some other machine-readable format published by a state public health authority and not locked to a dashboard or website that cannot be exported for analysis that provides aggregated counts of COVID-19 cases and deaths at the state or sub-regional level.

Making this data available is important because it allows journalists, researchers, & others wishing to study COVID-19 to get a better understanding of both conditions in their communities and the decisions made by government in response to the pandemic.”

How New Jersey compares to its neighbors

With that definition in mind, just what does New Jersey have to offer for COVID-19 data?

Not much.

Unlike three neighboring states – including New York, Connecticut & Pennsylvania – the homepage of New Jersey’s state open data portal has not been updated to highlight the state’s collection of COVID-19 data available for download to the same extent as its neighbors have done so. In fact, the New Jersey open data portal really has not changed much at all since the beginning of the year aside from the addition of a small icon. Not updating the state data portal to strategically highlight the availability of raw COVID-19 data was a missed opportunity for state officials to both showcase the value of the state’s open data initiatives as well as to build trust with the public by prioritizing transparency in the state’s response to the pandemic.

Instead, to find out what types of COVID-19 data are available through New Jersey’s portal, one must manually search for it. Even then, the results leave much to be desired. The first 5 results when searching the keyword “COVID” don’t yield any raw data for New Jersey at all, they’re just links to external websites that don’t provide New Jersey-specific data.

Click HERE for Full Story –> https://www.gavinrozzi.com/post/a-critique-of-new-jerseys-covid-19-data/?fbclid=IwAR1-AkJWkAMb-7Kf32ixxL1BA0n3CEQ-mmzAjYAqeTD5DDeDpnn6xEyvkVo

New Jersey is behind the pack when it comes to open data

To understand how far behind New Jersey is in publishing open data concerning the pandemic, we need only to contrast the state’s paltry availability of data with the efforts of our regional neighbors in the greater tri-state area.