Boston's dashboard is actually pretty great... their current status, not so much (17-Dec-2022)

From time to time I give Boston's COVID site a bit of flack on Facebook because they show the cumulative count of cases per neighborhood as being from 2020 and 2021 despite our now closing out 2022.  But really, I greatly appreciate that they're as transparent as they are. For instance, today I took a look at their downloadable data and can tell you that since the end of May, Boston's 7-day average hospitalization rate hovered between 130 and 175 people per day... but never reached 175... until this week... and the average from Thursday is 199.28. This roughly mimics last year where the average hospitalization rate was even lower for most of the year and never got to 175 from the end of July through early December and then reached 196 on 12-Dec. 

Oh, and their threshold for concern is 200 people per day.... so, not only are we mirroring last year's hospitalization rates but we're also on the cusp of reaching one of their thresholds for concern...  

Don't worry though, even if they blow through that threshold, they have 6 other thresholds to point to... two of which have to do with positivity test rate... their goal is 4%, threshold is 5%, and current is 9.7% (yes, nearly double their threshold).... their threshold for number of neighborhoods with >= 8% positivity is 4... there are 13 neighborhoods with >=8% positivity.

Happy Holiday's y'all.

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