Boston University’s COVID-19 Data Dashboard — available on the Healthway website — is updated daily with the number of positive, negative and inconclusive tests.
The data is posted to provide transparency to faculty and students, according to BU Spokesperson Colin Riley.
“Testing and sharing the results is to inform the members of the BU community,” Riley wrote in an email, “and by doing so to, encourage all members to commit to doing their part in taking appropriate precautions that will minimize and contain the virus from spreading.”
Positive cases will only be counted once per infected person, Catherine Klapperich, director of BU’s COVID-19 testing, said.
Klapperich said that after an individual with COVID-19 recovers, the virus, though dead, might remain in their body for up to 100 days. However, she said that person will not be contagious.
Because they no longer possess the ability to pass on the virus to non-infected people, BU will not be retesting those individuals or counting their positive test in the data dashboard during that post-recovery duration, Klapperich said.
Riley wrote that those who test positive will not be retested for at least 90 days.
Klapperich also said the daily testing numbers on the data dashboard are not indicative of the total amount of tests administered that day, but rather of the tests that are processed and completed that day.
“If that test showed up at 7 a.m. and didn’t make it through the process before noon,” Klapperich said, “it may not end up in the dashboard until the following day.”
Linette Decarie, assistant vice president of Analytical Services and Institutional Research at BU, said additional features will be added to the data dashboard in the future. Testing results for BU employees will be included in the dashboard as soon as next week.
Faculty testing is not currently included in the testing results, Decaries said, because not all faculty have returned to campus.
“There’s not enough data, but [faculty] have been being tested just starting a week ago,” Decarie said.
Data on student and faculty compliance with completing daily attestation surveys, as well as undergraduate COVID-19 testing compliance, will be added in September, Vice President of Information Services and Technology and Chief Data Officer Tracy Schroeder wrote in an email. Data visualization updates are also set to come in the near future.
William Higgins, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said he had viewed the dashboard once in the last week. He said he thinks it is a useful resource.
“The transparency of it is a nice thing to have and you trust the University more,” Higgins said. “It’s a good thing to have, overall.”
Got tested on Thursday, still have not heard about the result almost 48 hours later. Called the BU Covid line which is supposed to be manned 10am to 8 pm daily, no one answered that either (called after 10
am). Finally got someone from HR assure me that had I been positive they would have called by now. Really? Curious to see what average “processing times” look like when the dashboard publishes yesterday’s data.