The rest of the world is developing its vision for agentic government.

Ukraine's Agentic State (Diia.AI) · Estonia (X-Road) · Singapore (SingPass, Pair Chat) · Abu Dhabi (TAMM 3.0) · India (Aadhaar) · Australia (myGov) · New Zealand (Better Rules) · Brazil (Goiás) · UK (GOV.UK)

U.S. public health data infrastructure is being decommissioned.

Delaware's My Healthy Community (MHC)

Distributed and displayed extensive public health, education, environment, criminal justice, and economic data — from neighborhood level to statewide. The kind of infrastructure other countries are still trying to build.

Decommissioned December 31, 2025.

No archive preserved.

What's Happened to Public Health Data

Since January 2025

203 datasets removed from CDC and HHS in the first three weeks
38 CDC datasets paused — 87% vaccine-related
EPA's EJScreen gutted
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report halted — in continuous publication since 1952
Data Modernization Initiative defunded — the program rebuilding public health surveillance
Staff laid off who maintained Pregnancy Risk Assessment, National Survey on Drug Use and Health, and birth control safety monitoring
Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics — $100M needed, not forthcoming
Ryan White HIV/AIDS, Maternal and Child Health, Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance — removed from HHS
Justice40 Communities — environmental justice screening tool, revoked by executive order
invest.gov — the public record of federal infrastructure investment. Gone.

The Consequences Are Coming

Not just public health. Every domain of government.

2025 was the warning. Not the event. Here's what one disease looks like.

2,267 measles cases in 2025 — worst year since 1991. Three deaths. 93% unvaccinated.
733 more cases in first five weeks of 2026 across 20 states
Americas lost measles elimination status — held since 2000. Gone.
Vaccination exemptions rising in the majority of US counties. Kindergarten rates dropping below herd immunity thresholds.
The next pandemic will arrive into a country with fewer data systems, fewer epidemiologists, less legal authority, and less capacity to see what is happening than existed in 2020 — which was already inadequate.

What data surveillance revealed (2020–2022)

Disparities like these are visible only when data infrastructure exists to surface them.

Counties that Biden won in 2020 have higher vaccination rates than counties Trump won

Pew Research Center, March 2022

170%

"The coronavirus death rate among the 20% of Americans living in counties that supported Trump by the highest margins was about 170% of the death rate among the one-in-five Americans living in counties that supported Biden by the largest margins."

Pew Research, 2022

43%

"The excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters."

Wallace et al. JAMA Intern Med. 2023

1.52x

Cumulative age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality, 2020–2023: "NH Black or African American (123.9, 95% CI: 123.3–124.5)" per 100,000 vs. "NH White (81.5; 95% CI: 81.3–81.7)". Gap narrowed from ~2.1x in 2020 but persisted.

Abidin et al. BMC Public Health 25:3257, 2025

3.05 yrs

"The Black and Latino populations are estimated to experience declines in life expectancy at birth of 2.10 and 3.05 y, respectively, both of which are several times the 0.68-y reduction for Whites." (2020)

Andrasfay & Goldman. PNAS 2021

The Response

Organizations across the country are restoring government data outside government.

PEDP rebuilt EJScreen after EPA took it down
STAT News backing up and monitoring CDC data in real time
Harvard's Big Local News curating substitute data sources
Data Rescue Project archiving at-risk datasets
West Coast Health Alliance and Northeast Public Health Collaborative — regional vaccine recommendations independent of CDC

These are patches. They are not infrastructure.

Delaware had this infrastructure. Put it back the way it was on December 31, 2025.

December 2014 — Health Data for Delaware proposal

"Delawareans must have access to usable, meaningful, timely, and high-quality data about their health and the health of the communities in which they live."

Delawareans Must Have: 1. Access to their own health data. 2. Access to data about the community in which they live. 3. The tools to make change that positively impacts individual and population health.

The Architecture

Data Sources → Anonymization → Public & Private Instances

Data Architecture: Data Sources → Anonymization → Public and Private instances

The same platform served DHSS staff (unsuppressed data) and the public (HIPAA-compliant) — two views of one system.

The HIPAA Innovation — Expert Determination, 45 CFR §164.514(b)

Certified by Fritz Scheuren, Ph.D. (former ASA president) and Patrick Baier, D.Phil.

Frequency tables: cells must have k ≥ 11 individuals and populations of 500 or more
No disclosure by subtraction
If thresholds not met, cells aggregated over time, geography, or attribute

Four Suppression Rules

Basic — minimum count or population not met
Trend-hole — suppress one year, suppress all years at that geography/variable
Spatial-difference — overlapping geographies reveal too-small counts
Latent-variable — subtracting stratifications reveals too-small counts

HIPAA Certification — Fritz Scheuren, Ph.D. and Patrick Baier, D.Phil. — May 1, 2019

My Healthy Community — Launched May 13, 2019

Rt. 9 Library and Innovation Center, New Castle

Launch event — five years in the making

"Making data more transparent, accessible, and easy to understand"
— then-Governor John Carney

"When communities become aware of the level at which these issues are occurring in their neighborhoods, it can spur action"
— then-DPH Director Dr. Karyl Rattay

"Access to data is a key factor in making progress toward a stronger and healthier Delaware. The ability to easily access such crucial information like substance use and overdose data by ZIP code enables Delawareans to compare it to larger areas and examine trends."
— then-Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long

The COVID Pivot

The US response was slow and inadequate. But MHC was already built — the COVID dashboard stood up in weeks because the infrastructure existed.

500K+

Peak Unique Users / Month

1st

State with census block group
pandemic data

"MHC is an amazing asset for us as a state in so many ways. Right now, being able to use this platform to bring transparency to the public around Delaware COVID data is huge… Please know the work you do matters greatly."
— Dr. Karyl Rattay, then-DPH Director

MHC's COVID-19 Data Architecture

Data flow for MHC's coronavirus dashboard showing the data sources required for public and internal display. (Offutt-Powell et al., DJPH, 2021)

This Is What Delaware Had

Little Italy, Wilmington — search, map, community characteristics

Presented to the CDC's Geographic Working Group in March 2019, two months before the public launch and a year before the pandemic.

"Typing in an address to see what data were available for your specific geography was so meaningful."
— Dr. Tabatha Offutt-Powell, former State Epidemiologist

Movies of Disease

State of Delaware Asthma Hospitalizations, 2011-2016

New Castle County Lead Poisoning in Children, 2010-2016

Animated maps of disease over time and space, at any spatial resolution — statewide or county level.

Equity Counts Data Center

Built in collaboration with United Way of Delaware and the Delaware Racial Justice Collaborative

Health
ACEs, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, screenings Education
Graduation rates, suspensions, proficiency by grade Criminal Justice
Weapons, fights, police contact, parental incarceration Wealth Creation
Poverty, income, SNAP, broadband, rent burden, ADI Community Overview
Population and density by census tract

Equity Counts Data Center — Media Coverage

WHYY — November 2022

"New online dashboard tracks racial and economic disparities in Delaware"

A collaboration between United Way of Delaware, the Delaware Racial Justice Collaborative, and the Division of Public Health — built on the My Healthy Community platform.

whyy.org/articles/delaware-health-disparities-dashboard

The Equity Counts Data Center showed disparities at the ZIP code level — 17% of Delaware children in poverty statewide, but nearly 50% in some ZIP codes.

This data is no longer available.

More of What Was Lost

Data Storytelling
Narrative-driven health data — scope, demographics, geography, trends, response Climate and Health
Heat stress, vulnerability indices, climate-related health indicators Social Vulnerability — Census Tract
SVI at the tract level — community-level vulnerability data Prescription Monitoring Program
ZIP code-level opioid prescribing, risk scores, treatment gaps. Updated Sep 2025. Opioid Crisis — Data Story (Rebuilt)
More than one Delawarean dies from a drug overdose each day. Rebuilt from original source code. Equity Counts Data Center
Health, education, criminal justice, wealth creation — built with United Way and DRJC

A Few Last Fragments of Delaware's Public Health Intelligence Platform

My Healthy Community — What Remains archive

These are the fragments I was able to preserve.

They are a fraction of what Delaware built.

→ Open the archive

What Was Lost

flat CSV files on the
Open Data Portal

vs.

2,000+

indicators, information visualization,
and reports across many spatial
and temporal resolutions on MHC

Zero substance use or opioid data — the state's second-leading cause of preventable death
Zero equity and vulnerability data — ECDC gone. Social Vulnerability Index gone. Sexual violence reporting gone.
Zero environmental and climate data — air quality, water quality, Climate Vulnerability & Risk Analysis — all gone.
No data stories. No dual navigation. No neighborhood-level data.
No interactive data dictionary. No documentation for any data element.
No intranet capability — DHSS staff used MHC for vital functions like vaccination clinic siting
The vast majority of the data that was on the platform is no longer publicly available.

Bring MHC back online. Study what was built. Learn from it.

This platform can be restored as a public archive. It should be.

→ View the archive