Operationalizing an open-source dashboard for communicating results of wastewater-based surveillance

Abstract

COVID-19 saw the expansion of public health tools to manage the pandemic. One tool that saw extensive use was the public health dashboard, web-based visualization tools that communicate information to users in easy-to-read graphics. Dashboards were widely used prior to the pandemic, but COVID-19 saw expanded use and development. To date, dashboards have become an important part of public health surveillance programs around the world helping decisionmakers use data to evaluate different public health metrics including caseloads, hospitalizations, and environmental surveillance results from testing wastewater. Wastewater surveillance provides community-based, spatially relevant data on disease trends within communities to assess the scale of infection in a region, which makes it an excellent candidate for dashboard development to improve public health. We developed a dashboard for New York State's wastewater surveillance program using open-source, reproducible web programming. The dashboard we developed has been used for the COVID-19 response in New York, and our methods can be adapted to other programs and pathogens. We provide: • descriptions of how the dashboard was developed and maintained • specific guidance for reproducing our dashboard in other areas and for other pathogens • fully reproducible code with step-by-step instructions for researchers and professionals to make their own data dashboards

Keywords

• COVID-19
• Public communication
• Data sharing
• Dashboard
• R Shiny