My COVID-19 data newsletter
Right after the 2020 election, I launched COVID in Minnesota TODAY, an MPR News data newsletter about Minnesota’s COVID-19 outbreak. I use graphs and data to explain the trends in cases, hospitalizations, vaccinations and more — including breaking down when the data is misleading, or when we just don’t know what’s going to happen. Unfortunately, there’s no good web archive of each edition, but the May 6, 2021 edition is a good example of what the newsletter is like — I estimate when Minnesota might reach 70 percent vaccinated (a threshold just announced for the governor), explain why the vaccination rate has been slowing and how this decline appears different from past dips, discuss whether Minnesota’s recovery was slowing, and experiment with a new way of visualizing a common metric. (MPR News, 05/06/2021)