July 23, 2020
NEW REPORTS:
31 New Resident Cases Added
Resident Active Increase: 29
Resident Recovered Increase: 2
1 New CoreCivic Detainee Case
1 New HEB Pearsall Employee Case
Note: The “new reports” or “aggregate” information is based on active/recovered/deaths numbers provided by Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to Frio County.
*Detainee numbers are sourced from ice.gov/coronavirus
After another day of reporting from the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), more details about Frio County’s sudden drop in active cases this week have become clearer.
For over a month, DSHS has provided two sets of data to Frio County, both of which are shared on this site:
- Aggregate Data (includes pre-investigated totals)
- Investigated Data
Typically, since the aggregate data includes case totals that have yet to be investigated, this was considered the “quicker” data, and was always ahead of the investigated numbers.
This week, the investigations caught up to the aggregate. And they caught up with a vengeance, for a few reasons:
- DSHS’s method of marking a case as recovered has changed to clear them more quickly from the reports. DSHS moved to a “time-based strategy” of marking a case as recovered automatically two weeks from the test date.
- It appears that DSHS worked a backlog of cases that could have been marked recovered earlier by using the time-based strategy.
- However, over 100 cases were marked as “recovered” that have not completed two weeks from the initial case report, according to DSHS’s own data. The initial case report date is different from the actual test date, so it is possible that these cases’ initial reporting to Frio County was so delayed (due to slowdown from lab reporting or other unknown factors) that these cases were nearly recovered as Frio County received the reports.
Because of the apparent delay in aggregate numbers, it will be impossible to know if new cases added to the total are active or already recovered. As a result, we will modify our presentation to show daily increases or decreases, as we did at the top of this post.