We identified very quickly that we needed to be transparent with the residents of New Jersey about any information the department of health or the state had. So, we created a public dashboard with information on cases, hospitalisations and deaths mainly at the state level. Over time, we have gotten more granular and, for cases and deaths in particular now, the dashboard displays data at the county level.
We then got into vaccination efforts, starting off with state-wide reporting. Now, you visit the dashboard and look at vaccination coverage by age bands for every municipality in the state. We also report on outbreaks and vaccine coverage in long-term care, in educational institutions.
We created a dashboard very early on so that everyone could see where we were with the disease progression and how it impacted their communities and themselves personally. We then moved forward, using some of that information to drive decisions that we were making internally for the pandemic response across vaccination, testing, contact-tracing and other activities.
From ‘Lessons in Leadership: Using Data to Drive Public-Health Decisions’, McKinsey & Co