Week 20's COVID-19 Report

Week 20:

Week 20 COVID-19 Report will not present the usual graphs and tables. Instead, the purpose of this post is to explain DSHS’s new procedure for plotting Fatalities. Without getting into how medical records go from local hospitals to DSHS Trauma Area Offices to State DSHS Dashboard, this reporting is going going to look different than what we have seen until now. Specifically, this data will require a death certificate to "book" a death to a given county. When this document arrives in Austin, the statistic will be “back-dated” to the "time-stamp" on the certificate rather than the reporting date. DSHS illustrates this by color coding the newly added/later entries. Here, over a period of 10 days (time required to file a death certificate), totals will be topped off. For example, this week’s fatalities for Harris County, at 652 (total without Sunday's data), will have pending numbers attached to it such that when certificates turn up in Austin this number will grow.

For additional information, read Peter Walker’s Covid Tracking Project’s blog article, “Is there a Right Way to Track COVID-19 Deaths Over Time”, https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/is-there-a-right-way-to-chart-covid-19-deaths-over-time?fbclid=IwAR0zRnBjIhtGjSo7DOzb0zzx195vIZIPMKJgGWZQCpZGvmPp9etTUlZULRY