UNC announced Wednesday morning that it had ended the Carolina Together dashboard, used to display COVID-19 data and cases from the campus community.

The site now displays links to the CDC, Orange County and North Carolina COVID-19 case dashboards.

The campus message cited low positivity rates at 3 percent and local cases declining as reasons for the change.

“Over the past two years, we have been responsive to the changing conditions of the virus and the needs of our community,” the Carolina Together Testing Program said in a release. “Today we will make changes to the Carolina Together COVID-19 dashboard. The dashboard will be replaced with links to external resources, including federal, state and county dashboards, which are now the best indicators of cases in our local community. It will also ensure our campus community has access to the most comprehensive up-to-date data.”

Archived Carolina Together COVID-19 testing numbers on campus is still accessible. According to the dashboard, the number of total cases through on-campus testing from the start of 2022 through March 31 totaled 3,105. The last update to the dashboard was April 1.

Orange County Health Director Quintana Stewart spoke with 97.9 The Hill this week and discussed UNC’s removal of its public dashboard. She said university officials held conversations with the health department before its removal and landed on having everyone getting their COVID trends from a streamlined source.

“Because there’s so much data available,” Stewart said, “between what we had locally posted, what the state [health department] posts, what the CDC posts, it can really get confusing, quickly. So, we’ve all opted to really turn toward the newly-revised DHHS state dashboard site.”

Testing is still available through the Carolina Together site despite the end of the dashboard. The testing location is open Mondays and Fridays between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. and Wednesdays between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. Testing is voluntary and students no longer need to make appointments to test.

The Carolina Together Testing Program previously changed its vendor to third-party Radeas Labs in March.

 

Featured Photo via Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill

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