JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Paul Petruska started tracking confirmed cases to try to guess when he might reopen the state a few months ago.
Recently, the Department of Health and Senior Services began giving only the total for the entire pandemic. You would have to do your own calculations to find out how many new cases appeared.
“You couldn’t go back and check the day before,” said Petruska. “So if you get a new total and cumulative case, you don’t know what that means. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Her frustration is deeper. A bar graph tracks the data better, but Petruska noted that the results were constantly changing.
“On June 23, Missouri announced 434 new cases in its cryptic way of not giving you a number, but me doing math.”
Three days later, the chart showed that the June 23 total was 296.
“Two days later [June 28], is until 317. One day later [June 29] it’s up to 352. That’s not useful to anyone, “said Petruska.
An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the numbers adjustment political.
“The data we present every day, and several times a day, is not affected by anything related to politics,” said Lisa Cox, director of communications for DHSS.
DHSS says the graph changes from day to day because it first reports cases such as the day the test was performed. Use that date as a placeholder.
Once the local county health department talks to that case to see when they first felt sick, the state transfers it to that day.
“With epidemiology, what really interests us is when the person got sick and how long they’ve been sick, because that’s really what guides all of our public health interventions,” said Dr. Nathan Koffarnus, an epidemiologist with DHSS
Petruska says that modifying the numbers in that way is not helpful. He hopes for a better system before more people get frustrated like him.
“People out there who want to know what the risk is, it’s great to have objective numbers that you can trust and not something that has been adjusted based on memory,” Petruska said.
The state is now separating the swab test results from the antibody test results. You can see the state website HERE.
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