State-Level Emergency Department Visits For Respiratory Viruses

United States emergency department visit trajectories for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV are tracked weekly. The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) via data.cdc.gov provides percentages and trend classifications. Data is updated weekly on Fridays.

Use Cases

• Compare `percent_visits` for `COVID-19`, `Flu`, and `RSV` across different `geography` to identify regional outbreak hotspots.
• Model the `recent_trend` (increasing, decreasing, stable) of a `pathogen` using `week_end` and `percent_visits` for outbreak forecasting.
• Analyze the consistency between `trend_on_date` and `recent_trend` classifications to assess reporting lag or data revision impacts.
• Track the `status` and `percent_visits` of a specific `pathogen` over `week_end` for a single state to evaluate intervention effectiveness.

Strengths

• Weekly updates provide near-real-time surveillance capability.
• Trend classifications (`increasing`, `decreasing`, `stable`) are derived from a statistical model (p<0.05 threshold).
• Covers three major respiratory pathogens (`COVID-19`, `Flu`, `RSV`) and a combined metric.

Limitations

• Exact row count and historical depth are unknown, limiting reproducibility assessment.
• Data represents only emergency department visits captured by the NSSP, not total community incidence.
• Trends are smoothed with a 3-week moving average, which may delay detection of sharp turning points.

Provenance

Source

National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) via data.cdc.gov.

Collection Method

Aggregated from emergency department data submitted to the NSSP.

Time Range

Covers 2023 respiratory virus response; specific date range unknown.

Freshness

Updated weekly on Fridays.

Geography

United States, with data broken down by state (`geography` field).