The Lawrence Times has published an interactive statistics dashboard for COVID-19 cases, vaccinations and more in Lawrence and Douglas County.
This is the kind of news you might have expected to see in late July 2020, if we had existed at that point — but we started publishing in March 2021. And at that point, we were holding out hope that such a service wouldn’t be necessary. Case rates were dropping, businesses were reopening, guidelines were loosening.
When vaccines started to become available and many folks anxiously awaited their turn, we launched a vaccine FAQ page — then, as the vaccine became very readily available, we phased it out because it had served its purpose.
Case numbers are now climbing quickly again. Though we still hold out hope that the Delta variant won’t force us back into lockdown — and most importantly, that no more of our neighbors will get sick or worse — we want to do what we can to make data as readily available and helpful as possible.
We will be thrilled if we can stop updating this data in a month or so. But we’ll keep it up and running until this thing is done.
Our dashboard is not as extensive as the county’s. But we like the interactive elements that we can offer, and we wanted to pick out the key data points that we thought would benefit our readers the most to have available at a glance.
We are planning to add a graphic on the COVID-19 variants that have been sequenced in Douglas County as soon as we hear back from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment on a clarifying question.
The graphs on the dashboard will automatically update when we add new data, so the ones you see on that page will be the most current information we have. Let us know what you think, and if there are any other charts you’d like to see us create or other resources you’d like us to add, please reach out by emailing us at hello (at) lawrencekstimes (dot) com.
Find the dashboard online anytime at lawrencekstimes.com/covid. Click here to go check it out now.
You’ll also be able to find the page from the top menus on our site.
If you still need your vaccine, click here to find out where you can get it.
We wish you and yours well.
Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
