KITCHENER -- More than 44,000 tests for COVID-19, 1,300 cases and 1,190 recovered patients.
We see the numbers every day on the Region of Waterloo Public Health’s dashboard, but Jake Tennant lives and breathes them.
"That’s been probably the biggest project that I’ve worked on since the start of the pandemic,” said Tennant, a health data analyst with Region of Waterloo Public Health. “It has really developed over time.”
He is part of an epidemiology health analytics team responsible for collecting and reporting up-to-date information on COVID-19 cases every weekday.
“We have a number of different data sources that feed into the dashboard and a lot of the work and a lot of the time that’s spent goes into making sure that all those sources are complete and accurate, reconciling differences that might exist between them and getting to the bottom of that, and making sure it’s up to date and accurate,” he explained.
The COVID-19 summary started as a table of text, but has since expanded to a dashboard with categories, graphs, charts and a neighbourhood map that shows where the highest concentration of cases are.
Most recently, Region of Waterloo Public Health has also started tracking any possible links between the number of cases in each neighbourhood and demographics, such as socio-economic status.
The dashboard is updated Monday to Friday at 10:30 a.m. and data is accurate as of 7 o' clock the night before. At the start of the pandemic, it was updated every single day.
Data on test counts and workplace outbreaks is updated on Tuesdays and Fridays. These updates were also done daily when COVID-19 reached Waterloo Region.
“It can be challenging at times but I think I do get a lot of enjoyment out of that type of work,” said Tennant. “It’s certainly rewarding to be working on such a prominent project right now that a lot of people are accessing and going to regularly for updated information.”
Some of the data can be difficult to digest on a daily basis.
“Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the numbers but with something like deaths, you know, it’s really unfortunate to see that,” he admitted. “It definitely takes a little bit of a personal toll working with that data so frequently.”
One of the biggest challenges, he said, is keeping up with the pace of information that’s out there and how the pandemic has been unfolding.
“There’s so much information that’s been put out from not only our health unit, but also other levels of government and changes to testing criteria,” said Tennant. “So all of those things interact together to affect the way we interpret the data and what we see locally.”
By analyzing the local data, he and his team are arming the public with information.
“I think that it’s important for everyone to have access to updated information to help with their own decision making,” said Tennant.
