BoingBoing: “COVID-19 is definitely on the rise again across the United States. Dr. Michael Hoerger, who tracks COVID-19 data, shared yesterday that currently: about 1.2% of the U.S. population is actively infectious, which is quite high for the summer, when COVID is not consciously in everyone’s thoughts. We’re talking about 4 million U.S. infections per week, which translates into 200,000 Long COVID cases if using a conservative estimate of 5% of infections. COVID-19 is also on the rise in Europe. Spain, for example, is having a huge increase, as Madrid recently reached a 43.2% positivity rate, the highest thus far in the ongoing pandemic. This rise is no doubt at least partly due to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Madrid shows at the end of May; a similar rise in COVID-19 rates happened in Paris after Swift appeared there earlier in May.  You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that COVID was still a ‘thing,’ though, given the paucity of news coverage. It also doesn’t help that some sources of data have been phased out. For example, Biobot, which for the last three years has been one of the best sources of wastewater data in the United States, recently announced that as of May 30, 2024, they were scaling back on their public data reporting and would no longer maintain their public COVID-19 dashboard. And as of April 30, 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services stopped requiring hospitals to report COVID-19 data—including “how many adult and pediatric patients were admitted to a reporting hospital for COVID-19, whether those patients’ conditions were laboratory-confirmed or suspected and whether they were being cared for in an ICU”—to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network. Given that we have fewer data points tracking COVID-19 than we used to, I wanted to share an incredibly helpful resource that I personally utilize every single day to keep myself informed about the very real, very much still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Enter an unlikely hero who goes by “Data Report” who has been tirelessly (and often thanklessly) reporting COVID-19 data updates since the summer of 2022 (the first video on his YouTube is dated July 5, 2022). I’ve been watching him almost from the start, and his work has been really helpful to me, as he distills any available data he can find into a brief, informative 15-20 minute daily update…”