For municipality data, research brief, and technical report, scroll below this box.
After two years of tracking COVID-19 case rates by county in New Jersey, the Walter Rand Institute COVID-19 tracker is closing. We made this decision for two reasons. First, as many researchers have noted, official daily case counts are becoming a less reliable indicator of COVID-19 impacts as more and more people take rapid at-home tests that are not reported to official sources. Second, there are now many websites that allow users to easily compare case rates between geographic areas. We will continue to review data, and if it seems that our blend of local knowledge and data analysis is useful again, we will resume COVID-19 tracking. In early June 2022, we will release another brief report highlighting county-level differences in COVID-19 impacts between March 2020 and March 2022.
Contact Sarah Allred at srallred@camden.rutgers.edu
In New Jersey, it has been difficult to obtain official data about the number of positive COVID-19 tests in each municipality. However, many county health departments and other public sources report the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in municipalities each day. On April 22, 2020, WRI began tracking these sources. A research brief describing and analyzing two waves of COVID-19 cases in New Jersey utilizing this data is here. The methods used to collect and analyze the data are described in a technical document here.
This dataset is the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in municipalities throughout New Jersey on April 27, 2020; June 30, 2020; and December 13, 2020.