Operationalizing an open-source dashboard for communicating results of wastewater-based epidemiology

Dustin T. Hill , Christopher Dunham, David A. Larsen , Mary B. Collins 

COVID-19 saw the expansion of public health communication tools to manage and inform the pandemic as it evolved. While the utility of these tools is important in and of itself, it was also the case that during this time experts honed the effectiveness in a near real-time fashion. One tool that saw extensive use was the public health dashboard, web-based visualization tools that communicate information to users in quick and easy to read graphics. Dashboards were widely used prior to the pandemic in many fields, but COVID-19 saw expanded use and increased development. To date, dashboards have become an important and part of many public health surveillance programs around the world helping decisionmakers use data on a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to caseloads, hospitalizations, and to find out environmental surveillance results from testing wastewater. Wastewater surveillance provides community-based and spatially relevant data on disease transmission and trends within communities, making it an excellent candidate for dashboard development to improve understanding and use of the data to inform disease dynamics. We developed a dashboard for New York State’s wastewater surveillance program using open-source, reproducible web programming software. In just two months from September 2022 and November 2022, our dashboard received over 8,000 unique visitors with visits lasting an average of less than two minutes each. The dashboard we developed has been useful for informing COVID-19 response in New York and our methods can be adapted to other programs and pathogens. We provide descriptions of how the dashboard was developed and maintained, in addition to specific guidance for reproducing our dashboard in other areas and for other pathogens. The dashboard methods we present use the open-source program R, however, the methods can be used in other programs by researchers and institution seeking to develop public health communication tools.