Data Strategy and Execution Workgroup Community Profile Report (CPR)

The Community Profile Report (CPR) is published by the Data Strategy and Execution Workgroup (DSEW) of the White House COVID-19 Team. For more information, see the official description at healthdata.gov for “COVID-19 Community Profile Report”. Each issue of the CPR is made available as an attachment on that page. You can view all attachments by scrolling to the bottom of the “About this dataset” panel and clicking “Show more”.

This data source provides various COVID-19 related metrics, of which we report hospital admissions and vaccinations.

For hospital admissions, other sources of data in COVIDcast include HHS and medical insurance claims. The CPR differs from these sources in that it is part of the public health surveillance stream (like HHS, unlike claims) but is available at a daily-county level (like claims, unlike HHS). CPR hospital admissions figures at the state level and above are meant to match those from HHS, but are known to differ. See the Limitations section for details.

County, MSA, state, and HHS-level values are pulled directly from CPR when available; nation-level values are aggregated up from the state level.

Signal Description
confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_7dav Number of adult and pediatric confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions occurring each day. Smoothed using a 7-day average.
Earliest date available: 2019-12-16 for state, HHS, and nation; 2021-01-06 for MSA and county
confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_prop_7dav Number of adult and pediatric confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions occurring each day, per 100,000 population. Smoothed using a 7-day average.
Earliest date available: 2019-12-16 for state, HHS, and nation; 2021-01-06 for MSA and county
covid_naat_pct_positive_7dav “NAAT positivity rate is the number of positive [SARS-CoV-2 Nucleic Acid Amplification Test (NAAT)] tests divided by the number of [NAAT] tests performed and resulted. See the CDC’s coronavirus resources page for more information on this method. In rare cases, negative test numbers may be reported on a given day to correct previous numbers, and this sometimes results in a calculated test positivity of greater than 100%. In these cases, test positivity is capped at 100%.” - from the CPR data dictionary.
Earliest date available: 2020-12-07
people_full_vaccinated “People fully vaccinated includes those who have received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine and those who have received one dose of the J&J/Janssen vaccine” - from the CPR data dictionary.
Earliest date available: 2021-01-15 at any geo level except MSA and 2021-04-01 at the MSA level.
people_booster_doses “The count of people who received a booster dose includes anyone who is fully vaccinated and has received another dose of COVID-19 vaccine since 2021-08-13. This includes people who received booster doses and people who received additional doses.” - from the CPR data dictionary.
Earliest date available: 2021-11-01 for state, HHS, and nation. Not available below state level.
doses_admin_7dav “Doses administered shown by date of report, not date of administration. … [S]ubmitting entities will have the ability to update or delete previously submitted records using new functionality available in CDC’s Data Clearinghouse. Use of this new functionality may result in fluctuations across metrics as historical data are updated or deleted” - from the CPR data dictionary. Smoothed using a 7-day average.
Earliest date available: 2021-05-02 for state, HHS, and nation. Not available below state level.
booster_doses_admin_7dav “Doses administered shown by date of report, not date of administration. … [S]ubmitting entities will have the ability to update or delete previously submitted records using new functionality available in CDC’s Data Clearinghouse. Use of this new functionality may result in fluctuations across metrics as historical data are updated or deleted” - from the CPR data dictionary. “[A] booster dose includes anyone who is fully vaccinated and has received another dose of COVID-19 vaccine since August 13, 2021. This includes people who received booster doses and people who received additional doses.” - from the CPR data dictionary. Smoothed using a 7-day average.
Earliest date available: 2021-11-01 for state, HHS, and nation. Not available below state level.

Table of contents

  1. Estimation
  2. Limitations
    1. Differences with HHS reports
  3. Lag and Backfill
  4. Source and Licensing

Estimation

For counts-based fields like hospital admissions, CPR reports rolling sums for the preceding 7 days. The 7-day average signals are computed by Delphi by dividing each sum by 7 and assigning it to the last date in the included range, so e.g. the signal for June 7 is the average of the underlying data for June 1 through 7, inclusive.

The confirmed_admissions_covid_1d_7dav signal mirrors the Confirmed COVID-19 admissions - last 7 days CPR field for all geographic resolutions except nation. Nation-level admissions is calculated by summing state-level values.

The doses_admin_7dav and booster_doses_admin_7dav signals mirror the Doses administered - last 7 days and Booster doses administered - last 7 days CPR fields for all geographic resolutions except nation. Nation-level doses are calculated by summing state-level values.

Limitations

Nation-level estimates may be inaccurate since aggregations are done using state-level smoothed values instead of raw values. Ideally we would aggregate raw values before smoothing, but the raw values are not accessible in this case.

Because DSEW does not provide updates on weekends, estimates are not available for all dates.

Currently, of all the vaccination signals, county-level data is only available for people_full_vaccinated. Until 2021-11-15, several states reported vaccinated people not allocated to any individual county. These unallocated counts were reported using a FIPS code ending with 000 for that state, which is never a FIPS code for a real county.

This data source is susceptible to large corrections that can create strange data effects such as negative counts and sudden changes of 1M+ counts from one day to the next. Many of these corrections are documented in the “High-Visibility Data Notes” section in the first tab of the CPR spreadsheet for that day. To locate the correct spreadsheet for some time_value R, consult the following table:

Signal type CPR date
Hospital Admissions usually R+2, sometimes R+1
Vaccinations usually R+1, sometimes R+2

Not all CPRs have the same lag between the CPR date (listed in the filename) and the date for a particular signal.

Standard errors and sample sizes are not applicable to these metrics.

Differences with HHS reports

An analysis comparing the CPR labeled January 5, 2022 (newest file as of January 6, 2022) with the HHS COVID-19 Reported Patient Impact and Hospital Capacity by State Timeseries (downloaded January 6, 2022) suggests that the CPR undercounts the hospital admissions published by HHS by 10-15% or more. We are waiting from clarification from the data provider, but until then, exercise caution when comparing work based on the CPR with work based on HHS reports.

Lag and Backfill

The report is currently updated daily, excluding weekends. However, this is subject to change; DSEW previously issued updates on a twice-weekly schedule. We check for updates daily.

The CPR is prepared with an internal lag of 1-2 days for most signals. The file is usually posted to healthdata.gov the day after the date listed in the filename, excluding weekends and federal holidays. This results in an effective lag in COVIDcast of 2-4 days, or 5 days when Monday is a holiday.

Source and Licensing

This indicator mirrors and lightly aggregates data originally published by the Data Strategy and Execution Workgroup via HealthData.gov. As a work of the US government, the original data is in the public domain.