Regular readers of westofthei.com may have noticed that there has not been a weekday update on COVID-19 stats here since March 5.
That’s because the Wisconsin Department of Health Services data we rely on took a turn we didn’t know how to explain: Cumulative positive cases decreased 88 cases last Friday and Saturday.
Until we could explain why that happened, we did not publish any updates.
Here is the explanation of the negative numbers we received Wednesday from WDHS communications specialist Elizabeth Goodsitt:
With additional assistance from the State Contact Tracing team, the DHS COVID-19 Surveillance team has been able to ramp up data QA efforts such as merging duplicate case records and correcting disease incidents in WEDSS that were incorrectly set to “confirmed,” and updating their resolution status to “probable” (i.e., because they only had a positive antigen result). Certain dashboards and data tables that track cumulative case/death counts and/or the difference between today’s cumulative counts and yesterday’s counts may appear to have negative counts when corrections outweigh the addition of new confirmed cases that day. This has been occurring throughout the course of the pandemic, but may become more noticeable as case counts are decreasing and data QA efforts increasing.
We plan to resume our Monday-Friday updates Thursday, though we may have to adjust some of our graphs that calculate trends over time.
