By 1808Delaware
A casual observer would see a decline from 272 to 201 cases of anything to be a precipitous drop.
When the subject matter is COVID-19 infections, however, and the drop takes place from a given Friday to the next Monday, three days later, it begs the question of what is going on.
The Delaware General Health District clarified the matter in a Facebook post on Monday afternoon.
The District shared:
“As many of you may or may not be aware, we’re dealing with some pretty complex, real-time data elements. As of today, 30 dedicated staff members are handling data entry for almost 4,400 rows of people – both cases and contacts. After staff conduct about a 1-hour interview with them, they log about 30 columns of data elements per person — which results in the handling of over 131,000 cells of data!
Upon our routine quality control inspection of our data this weekend, we discovered that a formula within our spreadsheet did not delete some active cases that had recovered. This resulted in some discrepancy between the active cases map and active cases by school district map.”
In other words, it is good news — the lower number is the correct one.
The glitch has caused the District to revise its reporting schedule, moving to updates three days week. Per the District,
“Because we strive to provide the most accurate, transparent data possible to the public, we are adjusting our reporting to every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This new schedule gives our epidemiologists time to conduct quality assurance with our data to make sure it is the most accurate prior to release.”
