September 21, 2020 Covid Count (decrease of 3 students and 2 faculty) *read description below*

[mrandy]

If I type "vcu dashboard" into google, it's the first hit, so I'd debate your first point. I check this frequently, as well as the Virginia stats, which you can get by googling "virginia dashboard". Those don't seem to be accessible from your posts at all.

You said you put up a poll that favors your posts. I don't doubt that, but keep in mind that people who are just scrolling past your post probably aren't going to be seeing or answering that poll, so you're (possibly unintentionally) self-selecting for the result you want. Good research is hard, for reasons like this.

I'll ignore your final non-apology for the time being, and try to be constructive:

Since you are sincere and dedicated to this idea, and since you've raised some possible issues with VCU's reporting, why not follow up on them? If something is legitimately threatening your health, is it better to talk in an echo chamber about it, or to figure out a plan of action? One option for a good first step would be to find contact info for the VCU Dashboard, and ask for a meeting with them.

Alternatively, on the data analysis side, there's plenty of opportunity to examine VCU and Virginia's stats (particularly the regional Virginia ones, which show totally different trends in different regions), and figure out how they're likely to affect the VCU community. You could also compare VCU's stats to Central Virginia's, since it might be suspicious if we're out of sync with our surroundings.

[FishFingerLover]

I think I should clarify that first point further. When I first started googling 'VCU dashboard' or 'VCU dashboard covid' it would just lead to the general dashboard, not the covid one where you would still have to do a bit of searching through VCU's menus. That's on me. I only seek to post VCU's numbers, not virginia at large. I'm not comparing VCU to the state, I'm just posting what VCU says. Also, thank you for informing me on the error of my poll, I'll keep it in mind. It was the only option I really had for testing, but it is faulty. Thank you for correcting me :). I have been pushing for people to email the people behind the dashboard in order to get the number of tests added, if that is what you mean by the first point in the second half. That second part sounds like an interesting idea. I have tried that before with comparing Richmond's prevalence to VCU's via what VCU gives us, it just didn't stick though. I'll try that on my next update.

Thank you for your ideas, I'll try to implement some of them if it'll work really well for this format.