How is your State/Region reporting positive COVID cases?

[stepcutnut]

Over the last few weeks our State Health Department has finally come clean to the fact that they have been reporting Positive COVID cases as the total number of positive tests vs the actual number of people that have tested positive for COVID.

Example: A nurse in our area tested Positive for COVID and had to retest until she had a negative COVID test prior to returning to work. Seven of her tests were positive and the eighth was finally negative. All seven of her tests went into the total Positive cases, instead of one Positive COVID case being reported for her initial Positive case.

The Health Department said that over 64% of our Positive reported cases were from retests. This seems like a strange way to report information to the public, making the the actual positive case count extremely skewed.

Just curious if others know if their States/Regions are reporting per case or per positive test?

 

[mellowyellowgirl]

Aussie here! Ours is assessed on a per case basis. So they count each positive person as one case no matter how many tests that person took.

We get this everyday on Twitter at 11am. There is a link which you can go to, to know where the clusters came from and what venues were visited by infected people on which dates.

 

[Maria D]

Maine reports per case; a case is a person who tests positive for COVID.

From the maine.gov website:

What are Confirmed Cases? This represents the number of persons tested with a SARS CoV-2 PCR test result from any approved lab.

Can you say what state is doing this @stepcutnut?

 

[OboeGal]

In Ohio, one person who's positive is only counted once, no matter how many times they test positive.

 

[stepcutnut]

@Maria D sorry I do not feel comfortable posting personal info since this is a public forum. What you posted is what our state website said as well for reporting its cases, but clearly was not what our state ended up doing, they have not adjusted our numbers to correct for this either. Their reasoning for supposedly reporting incorrect information was-with the huge amount of information that the people doing data entry are responsible for each day, they cannot possibly keep track of someones personal identifier and just were entering them as another positive case instead.