WASHINGTON — DC Health acknowledged Wednesday that it did not submit COVID-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the week of April 27.
In a statement from DC Health, the agency said that from April 27 to May 8, data on the city's COVID cases, testing and deaths that should have been manually transferred to the CDC were not transferred. This issue has since been resolved, according to DC Health. It is unclear what the issue was and where the issue stemmed from.
The agency said that during this period of time, COVID data was continuing to be shared on the District's Coronavirus website. From April 24 to April 30, there were 704 new COVID-19 cases reported in the District and 0 deaths.
The Washington Post reports that this issue with the halt in COVID data in D.C. comes as cases in Maryland and Virginia are rising 29% and 43% respectively with some of the highest increases in cases occurring in the suburbs of the District.
Virginia and Maryland both report COVID data five days a week. Since March 2, DC Health has moved to report COVID data on a weekly basis on Wednesdays.
Johns Hopkins University tracks the frequency of how often each state reports COVID-19 data noting that since the pandemic the state-by-state approach to reporting has differed. Beth Blauer, the associate vice provost of JHU, wrote in an April 4 blog post about the importance of reporting on frequent COVID-19 data.
"We are still in a pandemic," she wrote. "A possible seven-day lag for noticing changes in disease trends when states shift from daily reporting to weekly reporting can be incredibly detrimental during a crisis, limiting the government's ability to intervene and protect people."
This warning comes as, according to the Washington Post, health officials are warning that another COVID-19 wave could be coming in the fall, bringing 100 million infections to Americans.
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