Allegheny County dealing with backlog of covid-19 hospitalization data

The Allegheny County Health Department is catching up on covid-19 hospitalization data that accumulated in the month of July.

At a Wednesday news conference, Health Director Dr. Debra Bogen explained why this week, the county dashboard stopped providing daily counts of the number of past and present hospitalizations.

During the surge in positive cases in July, Bogen said, the health department reassigned staff members who had been in charge of maintaining hospitalization data to work as case investigators and contact tracers.

Bogen said the county now is in the process of entering a “backlog” of data on older hospitalizations into its database. Many of the hospitalizations occurred in July.

“We didn’t feel like a new daily number of past or present hospitalizations that included many hospitalizations from last month would be beneficial,” Bogen said.

While the daily count was omitted, the total count of hospitalizations was updated, Bogen said. In the last five months, more than 900 Allegheny County residents have been hospitalized due to covid-19; about 10% of which had to be ventilated.

“I want to assure you, we are not ignoring hospital data,” Bogen said. “It is extremely important for us to follow this closely, because it’s an indication of the impact of covid-19 on our community and it reminds us each and every day about the seriousness of this virus.”

Allegheny County is seeing a slow and steady decline of positive coronavirus cases, officials said Wednesday afternoon.

County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said the county’s test positivity rate had fallen down to 3% Wednesday — the lowest it’s been since early- to mid-June. The county reported only 27 new cases Wednesday.

“Of course I was thrilled,” Bogen said. “On the other hand, I never think too much of one day’s numbers…you really need to look a week at a time.”

As daily counts of covid-19 continue to gradually fall, Fitzgerald said there’s been a lot of cooperation from business owners and community members. He asked that county residents not become complacent with the drop in numbers, especially as college students return and schools reopen.

“We’ve seen some good news over the last few weeks and sometimes when we see good news, a lot of us relax,” Fitzgerald said. “And then that roller coaster begins again.

“We want everybody to continue to cooperate.”