If you watch the Covid-19 dashboard published each day by the Vermont Department of Health, you may have noticed a quirk in the latest numbers: They change after they’re published.
Due to lags in reporting, Vermont has a long track record of occasionally adding cases to the prior day’s data or adding deaths that occurred days earlier. But the gaps between the daily dashboard update and where the numbers eventually land have increased recently, leading some to wonder what’s going on.
For example, when the health department first reported data for Sept. 4, the dashboard showed 54 cases that day. The latest data, available via the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, now shows that the state had 112 cases that day — more than double the initially reported number.
At his weekly press conference on Wednesday, Gov. Phil Scott blamed the fact that reports come in late in the day. Lab workers are “working there all day long and then having to work overtime, trying to get every sample in,” he said.
Health officials are then forced to report the total as is but later add the positive cases that are subsequently reported, he said.
Human Services Secretary Mike Smith said the state plans to change its procedures to prevent those swings in the data. Officials plan to hire more people through a contractor and switch their software, he said.
Asked whether initially lower numbers gave Vermonters a misleading impression of the data, Health Commissioner Mark Levine said the state adjusts the numbers to fix issues and be transparent. He advised against making “life plans based on a 24-hour period of data.”
“Can we do better? Yes, and we will do better, and we're looking at workflow improvements and identifying more staff” to investigate each positive case, he said.
Levine said more testing also means results come in later, and officials had to pick a final time in the day to conduct their assessment.
“We do rectify any of this information within 24 hours so that people are aware of what the true count was,” he said.
Although the numbers are adjusted, the health department’s dashboard does not draw attention to changes to previous days’ data. The dashboard’s first page highlights that day’s reported case numbers along with other daily metrics and the latest county-by-county totals.
To view trends over time, visitors must click through several tabs to a bar chart of cases by day. The chart has no details on how the data may be changed from how it was initially reported.
