Iowa’s corona virus website has made the pandemic less severe than it is due to a software bug that artificially reduces the number of newly confirmed cases
IOWA CITY, Iowa – A state agency says it is working to fix a data bug on Iowa’s coronavirus website that reduces the number of newly confirmed cases and therefore reduces the severity of the current outbreak, just as schools decide when to reopen open up.
The glitch means the Iowa Department of Public Health accidentally reports fewer new infections and a smaller percentage of daily positive tests than is actually the case, according to Dana Jones, an Iowa City nurse who detected the problem. This is especially important because school districts rely on state data to determine if they will offer in-person instruction when school goes up again in the coming days and weeks.
Potential thousands of coronavirus infections from past weeks and months have instead been misdiagnosed as happened in March, April, May and June, Jones said Monday.
‘It’s just awful. We have no idea what’s really going on, ‘Jones said.
The numbers are skewed because some people used to test negative but recently tested positive. The Iowa system has recorded its new positive results as happened when its original negative results were reported.
“It’s one of the worst data errors that can happen right now,” said Megan Srinivas, a physician of infectious disease in Fort Dodge, Iowa. “We make these policy calls based on completely defective numbers and that needs to be acknowledged.”
She said the situation means that Iowa’s prevalence of infection means and that the current trajectory of the pandemic is less than people realize.
An Iowa Department of Public Health official confirmed the glitch in an email to Jones Friday. He said a system-generated date when test results are reported to the state remains the same as an individual later testing positive.
“We recognize that this is a problem and have worked on logic to address it,” wrote Rob Ramaekers, the lead epidemiologist in the department’s supervisor. He added: “A similar situation is happening with the percentage positive calculation. We have addressed the issue and are actively working on the repair.”
But the state has yet to make the mistake public. Amy McCoy, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Health, told the Associated Press that she hopes to have more information on the issue soon.
Iowa’s overall number of more than 52,600 positive tests since March has not been affected – a 17th-highest incidence among states and the highest in the Midwest, according to Johns Hopkins University. But the current curve looks flatter than it should and the recent rates of positive testing are lower than they should be, Jones said.
School districts rely on a 14-day positivity rate calculated by the state to determine whether they should reopen classes for students and teachers. Gov. Kim Reynolds has instructed schools to provide at least 50% personal instruction, as long as the local positivity rate is below 15% – a threshold three to five times higher than many public health experts say is safe. So far, only a handful of districts have met this threshold.
Many districts have thought about starting the year with only virtual classes because of concerns about security related to the pandemic, but the new mandate has encouraged them to take hybrid plans in which students attend time classes in person. Some districts have postponed their start dates until early September and are still deciding how to proceed.
Mike Beranek, president of the Iowa State Education Association, a union that represents teachers, said Monday that school districts should put their re-decisions on hold until the data is fully corrected.
Jones followed the case counts that the state released daily, and was removed in recent weeks when cases from March, April and other earlier dates were routinely added without explanation. She finds that thousands of cases are incorrectly dated.
The number of coronavirus deaths reported in Iowa on Monday stood at 979, and could be more than 1,000 this week. The number of coronavirus patients statewide hospital, 283, is at its highest level since June 5th.
Eli Perencevich, a top researcher on infectious disease at the University of Iowa, said the state’s goal of reopening schools is high to begin with, and the data errors only make the situation worse. He said the state’s case count was already artificially low because it precludes the results of antigen tests that some local hospitals use.
“There are a lot of little things like this that add up to enormous things, where we massively underestimate the cases in the state,” he said. “Both need to be announced and corrected and removed immediately.”
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