Scientists at Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine have launched one of the first tracking tools that provides a daily snapshot into COVID-19 cases in rural communities across the country.
Using data from The New York Times and other sources, the COVID Urban Rural Explorer (CURE) focuses specifically on highlighting rural urban inequities in COVID trends by county and provides a daily report on rural areas experiencing spikes in COVID-19 cases. More specifically, the CURE tracker enables users to identify rural counties with both limited hospital capacity and where cases are rapidly growing.
“There are several data dashboards out there showing COVID-19 cases and deaths across the country, but we noticed that few if any are focused on rural-urban disparities,” said Ofer Amram, lead developer of the tool and assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology at the WSU College of Medicine.