Name: After pushback from public health officials, state defends its sudden move to weekly COVID-19 data reports
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After pushback from public health officials, state defends its sudden move to weekly COVID-19 data reports

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Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Please subscribe to keep reading. You can cancel at any time.Loading&amp;hellp;{{title}}{{description}}{{banner}}(renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax){{tagline}}{{special_title}}{{html}}You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.© 2022 Lee EnterprisesShare ThisAfter pushback from public health officials, state defends its sudden move to weekly COVID-19 data reportsShare thisThe state’s controversial switch to weekly COVID-19 data reports is an attempt to provide a deeper analysis while preventing misinterpretation or selective interpretation of the data, according to State Epidemiologist Jared Taylor.The state on March 17 announced in a news release that it had stopped producing its daily COVID-19 data updates in favor of a weekly report to be released on Wednesdays. The move prompted pushback from public health officials who oppose it, saying daily updates are informative and help guide pandemic response.To address concerns, the Oklahoma State Department of Health hosted a virtual news conference Friday in which Taylor said daily data isn’t particularly helpful at this point in the pandemic and has artificial swings that are meaningless.“We’ve known and recognized for a long time that when you put that information out what you get — what you oftentimes inspire — is a fixation on those individual data points or this anticipation and dramatic reaction to whatever change you may see in those,” Taylor said. “Just quite simply that does not tell the true story of what’s happening in a community, what’s happening in the state, how we need to be perceiving things and how we need to be responding to things.”Dr. Dale Bratzler, OU’s chief COVID officer, on Tuesday said Oklahoma is “a bit blind” now in trying to track and respond to the pandemic.“I’m not happy that we’re not reporting county, city and ZIP code level data right now,” Bratzler said.Dr. Bruce Dart, executive director of the Tulsa Health Department, on Thursday said his agency used the state’s COVID data on a daily basis to mold its decisions.Dart, , said he still wants to receive the data each day but wasn’t looped in on the state’s action to have an idea of why the change took place.“We’re going to figure out really how best to go forward,” Dart said, also saying that he is unsure how the switch will affect THD’s work. “So far I think we’ve adapted to every challenge that we’ve gotten through this pandemic.”Taylor apologized in his Friday news conference for not including Dart and other public health leaders in the state’s discussions, as well as providing advance notice of the move.The state can’t promise “a golden nugget” of analysis or insight in each weekly data report, he said, but the state has struggled to provide context while reporting daily. He said if the state sees value in returning to a daily offering, then it will.He said he feels comfortable that a one-week reporting interval irons out anomalies and isn’t too long of a wait.“There is a tradeoff as we are doing all of this work, we’re putting all of this very difficult to utilize and interpret data in front of you. It comes at a cost,” Taylor said. “We’re sacrificing more meaningful information in order to provide that to the public that ultimately brings little value.”Bratzler, during a Healthier Oklahoma Coalition news conference Tuesday, said he and his colleagues contacted the New York Times and Harvard-Brown University Pandemic Center to inform them their color-coded COVID-19 rate maps by county no longer were valid for Oklahoma.Both were pulling data directly from the state’s COVID dashboard, he said, meaning a series of zeroes were being plugged in that made Oklahoma and its counties’ rates of spread look much better than they are.“It is just a big white hole in the center of the country, and it looks like we’re the only state not reporting county data right now,” Bratzler said of the Times’ removal of Oklahoma’s colors from its map, with Harvard-Brown following suit later in the week.Bratzler said MyHealth Access Network — a nonprofit health information exchanged based in Tulsa — now is the best source of available data in the state regarding COVID-19.“We won’t be able to tell quite as well whether we see hotspots or outbreaks that happen in the state,” Bratzler said of the state’s weekly reports. “Perhaps the State Health Department will be able to do that, but we won’t be able to see it because it’s not transparent right now.”Video: Tulsa Health Department Executive Director Bruce Dart talks about the impact of the state’s change to weekly COVID-19 reporting.Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.{{title}}{{summary}}You don't have any notifications.Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.Topics

Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.Please subscribe to keep reading. You can cancel at any time.Loading&amp;hellp;{{title}}{{description}}{{banner}}(renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax){{tagline}}{{special_title}}{{html}}You are the owner of this article.You have permission to edit this article.© 2022 Lee EnterprisesShare ThisAfter pushback from public health officials, state defends its sudden move to weekly COVID-19 data reportsShare thisThe state’s...

After pushback from public health officials, state defends its sudden move to weekly COVID-19 data reports

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