New York

As of 2/14/2021, NYC reports 28,270 deaths (23,246 confirmed, and 5024 probable) while NY State reports a total of 36,882 deaths, out of which 19,238 occurred in NYC and 19,772 were deaths of NYC residents. The CDC’s reporting separates NYC and NY State into two separate jurisdictions, and on 02/14/2021, records 17,286 COVID-19 deaths in the state (excluding the 5 boroughs).

These statistics point to an under-reporting of NYC COVID-19 deaths in the totals NY state reports, since subtracting the CDC's totals for the state excluding the city from the NY state-reported totals—which should result in the number of deaths reported by the city—instead results in a number 8,500 deaths lower. Those differences cannot be explained by NYC's 5,024 probable deaths alone, which we expected might be causing the difference if the state wasn't counting them. This is a trend that we've seen in the data since April but has grown over time.

Do you have any sense of what's causing this difference, or would you be able to point us to someone who might?

Thanks for reaching out (and thanks for all the great work the COVID Tracking Project is doing!). Trying to align our numbers with the State’s has been an issue from Day 1, so this is covered in our GitHub (https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/README.md). To take it directly from the site, which puts it more clearly than I would: Differences between death counts between NYC and New York State: Data on deaths reported by NYC are derived from the Health Department’s surveillance database and will be different from data reported by the New York State Department of Health. The State Department of Health reports data on deaths from:

• The State Hospital Emergency Response Data System
• Daily calls to hospitals and other facilities that are caring for patients, such as nursing homes The NYC Health Department reports data on deaths that reflect both:
• Positive tests for COVID-19 confirmed by laboratories
• Confirmations of a person’s death from the City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Health Department's Bureau of Vital Statistics, which is responsible for the registration, analysis and reporting of all deaths in NYC I would also note that the NYS Health Emergency Response System, which collects data on deaths at hospitals, nursing homes and adult care facilities, is a self-reported survey that is completed daily by these facilities, so we definitely wouldn’t expect it to match exactly what we are getting through the methods listed above, which involve records of positive tests and administrative death data.

On the NYS COVID-19 Tracker you use the terms “Total Persons Tested” and “Number of Persons Tested.” Can you confirm that these are the same number? We're interpreting these values as being the total number of unique individuals tested. Is this correct? If so, do you have plans to release the total number of tests conducted? And for this metric, will you be able to provide historical data consistently under a machine readable format (i.e. csv or json)? Do you perform any deduplication to reach the “total persons tested” figure? If so, how? (i.e. instances swabbed per day/week; recording only one positive test per person, but multiple negative tests for the same person; etc.)? If the same person gets different tests results on different days, would you report the raw results as part of the daily positives or do you apply any kind of logic such as reporting only the first negative or positive result per individual? Do you have plans to release a full historical time-series for "Total Persons Tested?" We only have a record of “total persons tested” beginning May 12th.

Please see Open Data NY for testing data from the beginning of the outbreak: https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/New-York-State-Statewide-COVID-19-Testing/xdss-u53eFrom the database:  Test counts reflect those completed on an individual each day. A person may have multiple specimens tested on one day, these would be counted one time, i.e., if two specimens are collected from an individual at the same time and then evaluated, the outcome of the evaluation of those two samples to diagnose the individual is counted as a single test of one person, even though the specimens may be tested separately. Conversely, if an individual is tested on more than one day, the data will show two tests of an individual, one for each date the person was tested.Let us know if we can answer any questions for you once you've had a chance to digest the data.

On the fatalities dashboard, the section heading for Fatalities by Race/Ethnicity says "With 63% reporting, below is the breakdown for NYC as provided by NYCDOHMN." It has said 63% for the past two months, the whole time we’ve been collecting this.

In the middle of the worst public health crisis in a century, our COVID-19 tracker and our response to it continues to evolve.  The unprecedented amount and specificity of data we are providing to the public will continue to evolve.  In addition, New York City specific data is provided by NYC DOHMH.  We are working to implement a routine process which incorporates race and ethnicity data from NYC DOHMH on a weekly basis.