[M T]

Does anyone know why Santa Clara County changed its dashboard reporting format, as well as the information disclosed?

My opinion is that they changed because the new format loads faster (for the viewer) and requires less resources so can handle a larger load.
The new format has just the main info on the first window.  You have to click to get to each of the other dashboards that used to be on the main dashboard.

I hadn't seen they were pulling data locally now vs from the state.  Makes good sense.  They didn't have any update on Saturday because the state DB was down. 

Some data changed..  The reporting of testing results now reports "tests" rather than individuals.  That helps for comparing  % positive today versus last month (but prevents knowing the % of individuals that test positive -- instead you know a lower number).

They are definitely presenting results that weren't there before.  (The data was there, but getting the running averages required history.)  I think they're reporting the various data the state is watching in all counties.   Different in each county, but required by the state are the measures each county is watching to know how it is doing by its own measures.

Most notably, no more hospitalization capacity figures are provided (nor are the % of beds for Covid patients – either acute or ICU – reported).  Why is that, do you think?

I guess they must have changed things after you looked.  On the hospitalization graphs (all beds, ICU beds, other beds), each day they show the running 7 day average of bed usage as well as beds for the day..  When I look Tuesday night, Covid confirmed patients occupy 2.96% of all beds for the last week.  8.¡5% of ICU beds, 1.9% of non-ICU beds.  At this point, I'm fine with 7-day running percentages.

As you know COVID PUI's are also shown now.   If you want, you can compute the beds for each group (for the week)
For instance non-ICU beds have had 272 confirmed patient-days (= 1.95%) and  272+79 = 351 confirmed+PUI patient-days (= 2.51%).  I'm not sure why the math doesn't work right, but I get somewhere between 1993 and 2015 non-ICU beds (average for a week)   (Btw, perhaps you noticed that although they used to give numbers for acute and ICU beds, there were "other" beds to get to their total hospitalized.  So "non-ICU" = "acute" + "other")

Don’t you think it’s relevant (if not important) to know exactly how many of the increased numbers of hospitalizations are from LTCFs?

I think you misunderstood the LTCF hospitalizations numbers.   The now-gone format section on LTCF said "Hospitalization is only determined at the time a case was reported to us and do not represent patients that are currently or ever hospitalized".   So, we never knew how many current hospitalizations were from LTCFs.

What is probably going to change soon is to distinguish patients that reside in SCC county from patients that come from other than SCC.  The state has suggested that information be available (to the state & county), which may mean it is made available to the public.

[M T]

Does anyone know why Santa Clara County changed its dashboard reporting format, as well as the information disclosed?

My opinion is that they changed because the new format loads faster (for the viewer) and requires less resources so can handle a larger load.
The new format has just the main info on the first window.  You have to click to get to each of the other dashboards that used to be on the main dashboard.

I hadn't seen they were pulling data locally now vs from the state.  Makes good sense.  They didn't have any update on Saturday because the state DB was down. 

Some data changed..  The reporting of testing results now reports "tests" rather than individuals.  That helps for comparing  % positive today versus last month (but prevents knowing the % of individuals that test positive -- instead you know a lower number).

They are definitely presenting results that weren't there before.  (The data was there, but getting the running averages required history.)  I think they're reporting the various data the state is watching in all counties.   Different in each county, but required by the state are the measures each county is watching to know how it is doing by its own measures.

Most notably, no more hospitalization capacity figures are provided (nor are the % of beds for Covid patients – either acute or ICU – reported).  Why is that, do you think?

I guess they must have changed things after you looked.  On the hospitalization graphs (all beds, ICU beds, other beds), each day they show the running 7 day average of bed usage as well as beds for the day..  When I look Tuesday night, Covid confirmed patients occupy 2.96% of all beds for the last week.  8.¡5% of ICU beds, 1.9% of non-ICU beds.  At this point, I'm fine with 7-day running percentages.

As you know COVID PUI's are also shown now.   If you want, you can compute the beds for each group (for the week)
For instance non-ICU beds have had 272 confirmed patient-days (= 1.95%) and  272+79 = 351 confirmed+PUI patient-days (= 2.51%).  I'm not sure why the math doesn't work right, but I get somewhere between 1993 and 2015 non-ICU beds (average for a week)   (Btw, perhaps you noticed that although they used to give numbers for acute and ICU beds, there were "other" beds to get to their total hospitalized.  So "non-ICU" = "acute" + "other")

Don’t you think it’s relevant (if not important) to know exactly how many of the increased numbers of hospitalizations are from LTCFs?

I think you misunderstood the LTCF hospitalizations numbers.   The now-gone format section on LTCF said "Hospitalization is only determined at the time a case was reported to us and do not represent patients that are currently or ever hospitalized".   So, we never knew how many current hospitalizations were from LTCFs.

What is probably going to change soon is to distinguish patients that reside in SCC county from patients that come from other than SCC.  The state has suggested that information be available (to the state & county), which may mean it is made available to the public.