There’s no new spike in number of COVID-19 cases in Christian County, but an audit of reporting databases has created an increase in total number of local coronavirus cases going all the way back to the beginning of the pandemic.
There were 51 newly reported cases Wednesday, but the numbers show many of those are from a backlog in that the number of active cases actually dropped to 66.
The Christian County Health Department sent a statement Wednesday afternoon clarifying the jump in overall cases.
When a medical provider in Kentucky has a patient who tests positive for COVID, proper protocol is to report it to their local health department. The department then notifies the state, which puts those numbers in a computer system called NEDSS.
Amanda Sweeney-Brunt says information should travel through the same information channels when reporting deaths as well.
She says the health department is often left out of the loop, however, when numbers are reported directly from a medical provider to the state. Many Christian County citizens visit a Tennessee medical provider and Tennessee has a completely different reporting system, which causes many of those cases to bypass the health department and go directly to the state.
Public Health Director Kayla Bebout says in a news release, “Over the last several weeks, as numbers have decreased and we have been afforded time to recalculate information for accuracy, we have noticed a significant number of cases in the NEDSS system that were calculated and reported at the state level, but were never reported to the Christian County Health Department. Among these numbers were also several unreported deaths.”
Now that missing cases, ranging from the beginning of the pandemic until now, have been identified, those cases and deaths will be reflected in the daily report.
Bebout says, “The increase does not mean we have a large number of new cases in Christian County. We are simply adding backlogged information, information that has already been calculated at the state level but was never reported to the local health department, to our numbers.”
The spike in overall numbers will not affect Christian County’s status on the Kentucky incidence rate map, due to the cases having already been calculated in the state system.