A Quality Control review by the Waco-McLennan County Public Health District (HD), identified an incomplete reporting and accounting of recovered cases. (Cases remain as active until reported as recovered).  Analysis revealed two main contributing sources:

• In the last week of June, the HD outsourced a portion of the case investigations and contact tracing to the Texas Department of State Health Services. These cases were not added to the recoveries count, so they were still marked as active. 

Action taken: All cases that have a date of collection more than 10 days ago AND are not hospitalized or deceased, have been marked as recovered.

• There is a delay in getting reports of cases that were tested outside the county or the State. Sometimes, these delays may be as long as two weeks. If we receive a case report that has a date of collection/onset dating more than ten days ago, then the formula would not have added it to the number of recoveries for that day.

Action taken: The formula has been changed to calculate the cumulative number of recoveries in place of counting the number of new recoveries each day.

Many people have asked why there is a difference in some of the numbers listed on the dashboard, vs. those on the downloadable "Test Count" Excel spreadsheet. There are more cases reported in our total case counts than what is shown in the Test Count spreadsheet.

Reasons why these numbers differ:

1. The Excel spreadsheet reflects the number of tests conducted each day. When any of these tests comes back as positive, then that positive is shown for the date the test was collected. The reason for this is, that person was positive on the date they were tested, not when they got the result.

For example, if Patient A were tested for COVID-19 on July 20 at an area testing facility, and then got his results as a positive on July 22, this would be counted on the spreadsheet as a positive on July 20.

In contrast, the dashboard reports positive cases based on the day the Health District received the report. So if that testing facility that tested Patient A then reported this positive to the Health District on July 23, the dashboard would show a positive for July 23.

2. The Test Counts spreadsheet and associated graphs include total tests conducted at a finite number of facilities in McLennan County, including the major hospitals and their clinics, the Family Health Center, Baylor University Student Health Services, and Premier ER locations. It does not include the residents who tested positive outside the county or from any other facility that was not mentioned earlier or surveillance testing. In order to calculate the most accurate positivity rate, we can only count positive cases from the entities that are consistently reporting their total tests conducted.

Yes, all Baylor students that are McLennan County residents are included in the McLennan County report. If the student resides outside of McLennan County, then they are not counted in the report.

The County dashboard only includes McLennan County residents. If a Baylor student resides outside of McLennan County, then they are not counted in the county dashboard but may be counted in the Baylor dashboard. Hence, the numbers in these two dashboards will not match.