How does the Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit report their COVID-19 cases online?
That has been a question many people have been asking recently as there has been some confusion when it comes to news reports on the data compared to what is visible on the website.
For example, on a given day, we may report several cases but if you were to view the chart, the number would seem smaller.
The reason being is while the health unit is receiving confirmation of a positive case on a certain day, it doesn’t mean it will be marked down on the specific day on their data.
So for example, on Wednesday our case count went from 686 to 697 which is an increase of 11 new cases on that day.
The recovery number did not go up, so it stayed at 622.
The active case count for the day before was 27, but because there were 11 new cases and 0 recoveries, that increased to 38.
Some of the confusion comes when you look at the calendar on the side.
It did update yesterday with 8 new cases for the Tuesday but the 3 other cases were added to previous dates in the calendar when the person would have either been tested or first shown symptoms.
For this reason, the easiest way to keep track of the locations of all the new cases is for keep a tally of the chart (posted below) and see where there are increases in numbers.
The above breakdown has locations in our community, though as Communication Director Matt Terry explains there will be some cases that won’t have a location on the report.
For example, Dogsnest may have had someone test positive for COVID-19 but because less than 5 people have tested positive, that town will not appear on the breakdown.
At the radio station, we take a screenshot of the charts and the numbers beside them and then compare them to the same charts from the day before.
This way we can get a full picture of where the cases are coming from.
With that, sometimes information does change.
A few days ago three cases were actually removed from Simcoe, so that is why we can’t always confirm where all the new cases are from as sometimes it may be a matter of cases moving to a different community.
For example, if we reported 2 new cases but Simcoe went down by 3 cases, we would likely see 2 new cases in the chart but we’d also see those 3 cases added to another location, so we can’t specify whether a community that saw an increase was due to a new case or from a case being moved over from Simcoe.
Communication Director Matt Terry explains that while they do provide daily updates with all the information they have, they do get more information and learn different things throughout a given day.
To break it down further, there is a middle tab that also divides it by gender and age as well if you are looking for that information.
When it comes to deaths, you’ll note two numbers are located there.
The 32 deaths are for people who passed away as a direct link to COVID-19 while the 5 are for people who passed away, and while they did have COVID-19 at the time, it wasn’t the contributing factor to their passing.
When it comes to negative test results coming in, that is to be taken with a grain of salt.
As we previously reporting in this story, the health unit does not always provide all the negative tests to the website when providing an update – instead they focus on providing as much information as possible to the positive cases.
The health unit updates their page every day, roughly around 10 a.m., and it can be found here.
