NCPH and Connecting Point Unveil Community Data Project

We all want a clearer picture of how COVID-19 is moving through our community, and now Connecting Point, in partnership with the County of Nevada, is empowering residents to do just that. The Nevada County COVID-19 Community Data Project is crowd-sourced, relying on Nevada County residents who have COVID-19-like symptoms to share their experience to benefit the wider community.

Anyone showing COVID-19-like symptoms can report them using a simple form. The data will then be combined and shared on the COVID-19 Community Data Project Dashboard. The Public Health Department will use the data to detect possible outbreaks and ongoing transmission in the absence of widespread testing.

“Because the demand for testing continues to exceed the capacity to test due to a critical shortage of necessary testing supplies, Nevada County Public Health continues to recommend prioritizing testing for high-risk patients until testing supplies becomes more available,” says Jill Blake, the Director of the Public Health Department. “Unfortunately, this will mean that the number of lab-confirmed tests may not reflect the true spread of the COVID-19 virus in our county.”

The COVID-19 Community Data Project Dashboard allows the community to look by their geographic area to get a snap-shot of what their neighbors are reporting. The more people who complete the survey, the more accurate the Dashboard will be.

This project does not take the place of testing. It is meant to compliment testing results and—in the absence of widespread testing—provide community-level data that can be used to better understand the spread of COVID-19 in Nevada County.

The information provided may be shared with the Nevada County Public Health Department. Individuals choose