Public health, by the numbers. A new county tool has its moment in the limelight.

Good afternoon, editor Sara Rubin here. 

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a crash course for many journalists and for the public at large in epidemiology. It’s also been a crash course in math, as numbers help tell the story—and they help determine when various sectors may reopen, and what it’s deemed safe for us to do or not do. 

So now that we’ve all gotten used to using numbers to understand public health, it seems like especially perfect timing for a new county dashboard that brings together a lot of relevant health information. DataShare Monterey County is a new website that provides insight into 287 different health indicators, from things like the obesity rate and rates of death due to certain types of cancer, as well as data on fast food consumption and health insurance. The website comes with an easy-to-find translate button at the top. 

The data isn’t, for the most part, new or surprising—the information comes from a variety of sources that were already available. But they weren’t necessarily accessible. “There is lots of data out there and it’s great, but quite often it’s for people who have a lot of experience manipulating data,” says Krista Hanni, planning, evaluation, and policy manager in the Monterey County Health Department. “This makes data a little more usable for the public. I feel really good about bringing data to the people in a very usable format.”

The dashboard takes a broad and comprehensive view of health, meaning it’s not all about what you might consider strictly “health.” It shows how we’re doing on things like increasing access to public transportation and decreasing violence (on both measures, Monterey County does not meet targets). 

A lot of the data is intuitive, but some numbers surprised me at a glance. Only 74.8 percent of moms received early prenatal care, and only 1.6 percent of workers commute using public transportation—which is fewer than those who walk to work, 3.1 percent. Some of the data is outdated—the hunger tab takes me to a 2016 study, for instance—and there’s a lot of untapped potential here. But like a community’s health, the DataShare website is also a work in progress, and there will be more points added over time. 

The site was built by Health Communities Institute at the company Conduent, and costs Monterey County $20,000 a year (plus another $10,000 for the launch). Hanni will present the new site tomorrow, Oct. 27, to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors when they meet at 10:30am with a walk-through of how to use it. 

A health crisis seems to me like as good a time as any to reinvest in our community’s health. Better prenatal care and public transit are not going to end the pandemic, but they are going to help us implement the public health infrastructure we deserve—and that will help us stay resilient in the future.

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com