The Leeds, Grenville and Lanark District Health Unit is starting a new initiative to make data on infectious diseases available to the public.
Susan Healey, the organization’s Communications Coordinator, says a new dedicated page on the Health Unit website called the “Diseases of Public Health Significance Surveillance Dashboard” has been created to make that information more available to people.
“Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, public interest in case counts and disease trends related to infectious diseases has increased,” Healey says, “but care must be taken in protecting individuals’ privacy before data can be released.”
According to Healey, the dashboard will receive regular updates.
“This dashboard will be updated the second Wednesday of every month with information about reported cases, monthly and annual trends, and case demographics,” she explains. “Data will be available for the current year and for years dating back to 2005 to identify trends over time.”
You can view the dashboard right now here. Healey says COVID-19 data won’t be added to the dashboard, and instead can be found elsewhere on the Health Unit website.