A nurse in Iowa City, Iowa, discovered a glitch in the state’s coronavirus website that caused the site to incorrectly reduce lower numbers of new COVID-19 cases and, by extension, a lower statewide period of infection, resulting in government agencies making decisions based on invalid numbers.
The Associated Press reported Monday that Dana Jones, the nurse who discovered the problem, was contacted by the Iowa Department of Public Health in an email confirming the validity of her discovery and noting that the agency is working to resolve it. solve problem. However, the inaccurate data was not reported or publicly announced until Jones spoke to the AP.
“It’s one of the worst data errors that can happen right now,” Megan Srinivas, an infectious disease specialist from Fort Dodge, Iowa, told the AP of the uncovered errors. “We make these policy calls based on completely defective numbers and that needs to be acknowledged.”
“There are a lot of little things like this that add up to enormous things, where we massively underestimate the cases in the state,” added Eli Perencevich, a researcher on disease at the University of Iowa, in a interview with the AP. “Both need to be announced and corrected and removed immediately.”
A health department official told Jones in an email that the agency was “working on logic to deal with the problem.”
“A similar situation is happening with the percentage positive calculation. We have raised the issue and are actively working on fixing it,” Rob Ramaekers, lead epidemiologist for the health department’s supervisor, added in the email.
In a statement to the AP, a spokesman for the agency added that the department hopes to have more information on the issue for public release in the future, but declined to comment further.
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