Hamilton County Schools
Important message about Hamilton County Department of Education data
Data complications
HCDE currently reports the monthly total for student and staff cases as a percentage of the student/staff population (eg. 0.01%). Computing the precise number of cases from this percentage requires:
sufficient precision (significant digits) of percentage data
total student and staff population
On two occasions, the total staff monthly cases percentage decreased over the course of a day, with no explanation.
During the first few days of a given month, HCS often adds case data to the previous month's total. This could be due to a reporting backlog, although HCS has not stated a reason. Because HCS does not report daily new cases, these cases are shown on the last day of the month on the charts below.
Computation assumptions
Because HCDE is not making the population data explicitly available in their data reporting, the following assumptions are being used for case data computations:
total student population: 44,376 (based on 2018-2019 school year, source: Tennessee Department of Education)
total staff population: 5,682 (based on computations from HCDE case data)
Implications
Consequently, student total case data has an approximate margin of error of ±2. Because daily new student cases are computed from tallies of total cases, that metric is also affected.
Data needs
To solve this problem, HCDE could simply report this data in an easier-to-digest fashion :
Daily New Cases, stratified by students and staff
Total Population, stratified by students and staff
Cases
Active cases among students by day
New cases in school-aged children in Hamilton County by day
Active cases among staff by day
New cases among students by month
New cases among staff by month
School Closures
The following visualizations are intended to be a time-series record, not announcements of school closures—refer to the HCDE website for that information. Reporting of building closures for cleaning and contact tracing began on 13 Aug 2020. HCDE reports this data twice on weekdays and only includes buildings closed during the instructional week. Some data on 14 Aug is gathered from a Times Free Press report.