As part of a database transition, Clark County Public Health encountered delays to its daily reports of COVID-19 cases last week.
Reports on Wednesday and Friday were each delayed. Wednesday’s report of cases arrived a day later, and Friday’s update was grouped into Monday’s report.
The reporting delays come at an important time in the pandemic, when health officials are worried about a surge in virus cases tied to Thanksgiving, but the delays only impact the public’s ability to know about case counts on a daily basis.
Throughout the database transition, Public Health has continued to receive notification of positive COVID-19 tests and has continued to do case investigations and interviews, according to Public Health Public Information Officer Marissa Armstrong.
The delays happened because Public Health is migrating from an internal case management database called Kohezion to a state database called Crest.
Armstrong said in an email that the state plans to report county-level COVID-19 metrics through Crest, but Public Health is still using both Crest and Kohezion at the moment.
Public Health began using Crest for new cases confirmed on or after Dec. 1 and will continue to use Kohezion for cases prior to Dec. 1 until those patients complete their isolation periods.
While performing data quality control measures last week, Armstrong said Public Health identified duplications, which is why there was no report Wednesday.
Public Health removed the duplicates and provided a report Thursday. On Friday, Public Health encountered more questionable data, so the report was delayed until the data was verified, Armstrong said.
Armstrong said the issues seem to have been resolved, but added that there could still be some delays in the near future.
“Our data team has been working diligently to identify and correct these issues so we can continue our daily case updates,” Armstrong said. “We believe we have resolved the issues, however, we are still transitioning databases and learning a new system, so there may continue to be delays. We want to ensure that the data we are providing is accurate.”
