Environmental scan of COVID-19 infection dashboards in the Florida public school system

Abstract

Public dashboards have been one of the most effective tools to provide critical information about COVID-19 cases during the pandemic. However, dashboards for COVID-19 that have not received a lot of scrutiny are those from the public school system. We conducted an environmental scan of published dashboards that report and track new COVID-19 infections in the Florida public school system. We found that thirty-four percent of counties do not provide any public dashboard, and there was significant heterogeneity in the data quality and framework of existing systems. There were poor interfaces without visual tools to trace the trend of COVID-19 cases in public schools and significant limitations for data extraction. Given these observations, it is impossible to conduct meaningful policy evaluations and proper surveillance. Additional work and oversight are needed to improve public data reported.