Yesterday, when the Appleton Health Department reported last week’s Covid numbers it indicated that it had, for the last two years, been undercounting Covid deaths. Instead of having had 81 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, Appleton actually had 149 deaths (68 more than the Appleton Health Department had reported to the public). They explained this discrepancy by saying, “Previously, the department relied on receiving death reports of public health concern as required by State Statute 979.012 (https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/979/012). The direct reporting of medical coroners to the health department has led to an underreporting of COVID-19 deaths in Appleton.”
I reached out to Health Officer Sepers and asked him where the best place was for Appletonians to get the most accurate historical data on Covid case counts and deaths in Appleton.
The Wisconsin Department Of Health and Human Services publishes Covid data in a number of ways, one of which is by municipality; however, the data as presented by DHS does not align completely with the data presented by the Appleton Health Department. For example, DHS shows Appleton having 152 cumulative Covid deaths as compared to the 149 reported by the Appleton Health Department. DHS shows Appleton with a cumulative confirmed coronavirus case count of 16,160 as compared to 16,547 reported by the Appleton Health Department.
Health Officer Sepers explained that patient health information had been removed from the data DHS made publicly available, but the Appleton Health Department had access to that patient health information and was able to use it to further cleanup the data to ensure accuracy. He went on to say, “the death data variance between 152 (website) and 149 (AHD reported today) is explained by the methodology that we used to arrive at this number. In order to count deaths, we included only those that featured complete records that included both a ‘died due to COVID-19’ and ‘date of death’ variable. It appears that DHS website is only using the ‘died due to COVID-19’ variable.”
Although he did not explain what might be driving the discrepancy between the cumulative case counts as reported by DHS as compared to the Appleton Health Department he did say, “Variance between the reported cases from the DHS website (20,993) and the running AHD cumulative reporting (21,473) is something we are looking at closely as we continue implementing quality improvement projects looking at these data to ensure maximum accuracy.”
I did send Health Officer Sepers a follow-up question asking if there was a reason why the staff members who were pulling the daily numbers from the DHS spreadsheet never questioned why Appleton’s death statistics didn’t line up with the spreadsheet they were pulling other numbers from. I will update you on that answer when I hear back from him.
Going forward, I intend to use the DHS information when I present Covid data, at least until it becomes clearer as to what went wrong with the Appleton Health Department’s reporting of numbers and that those issues have been corrected.
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