Skip to main content

Coronavirus hospital capacity dashboard disappears from CDC website

A coronavirus hospital capacity dashboard on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website is now hidden from the public. 

The dashboard is regularly updated with the availability of hospital beds across the country as a way to monitor hospitals’ capacities, but the data set disappeared from CDC’s website on Wednesday, as first spotted by ProPublica journalist Charles Ornstein. 

The information lived on the National Healthcare Safety Network’s COVID-19 module page and the CDC’s COVID-19 data tracker. The webpage now displays a message that says: “Data displayed on this page was submitted directly to CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) and does not include data submitted to other entities contracted by or within the federal government.”

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The data includes information on current inpatient and intensive care unit bed occupancy, health care staffing, and protective equipment supply, according to CNN. The information was previously available to the public and was used frequently by health care workers, public health officials, and researchers to determine how well a particular area is doing against coronavirus cases. 

On July 10, new guidance was introduced by the Trump administration to reroute the information directly to the White House and bypass the CDC. The new directive went into effect on Wednesday, July 15. 

Digital Trends reached out to the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services for comment. We will update this story when we hear back. 

There are other popular online tools used to track coronavirus data, such as the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard, that provide detailed, up-to-date statistics about infection rates in states and countries.

The latest confirmed coronavirus case numbers in the U.S. are 3.53 million, and there have been 138,000 coronavirus deaths. 

For the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak, visit the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 page.

Editors' Recommendations

Allison Matyus
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…
The founders of Instagram reunite to create a coronavirus tracker website
episode 327 coronavirus hero

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the company in 2018, but they have now reunited to launch a website for tracking the spread of coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, across the U.S. The Rt.Live website shows how fast the virus is spreading with data for each state.

The name Rt comes from the metric which the site tracks, which the site describes as "the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale. It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer."

Read more
New coronavirus dashboard offers astonishingly detailed data by county
Coronavirus dashboard john hopkins

As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases globally nears the 2 million mark, a new dashboard has launched showing county-by-county data for confirmed cases, recorded deaths, testing rate, fatality rate, hospital capacity, and more.

It comes from Maryland-based Johns Hopkins University, which received much praise for the launch early in the crisis of its dashboard showing coronavirus cases by nation.

Read more
Peak Design’s popular tripod emerges from Kickstarter to fund coronavirus relief
peak design travel tripod impressions 14

Peak Design’s first tripod raised $1 million in just the first two hours of its Kickstarter campaign -- so how much can the company raise by dedicating the first four days of retail sales to COVID-19 relief? On Tuesday, April 7, Peak Design launched the Travel Tripod, making the compact tripod that earned $12.1 million from Kickstarter last year available without the crowdfunding risk.

Peak Design says that 100 percent of the profits from the first four days, April 7 through April 10, will be donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Foundation and Climate Neutral, and designated to support the organizations’ current response to the coronavirus and climate change. 

Read more