PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – Every day for more than six months, Local 10 and Local10.com have updated COVID-19 numbers around the state, the county and even city-by-city to report to viewers. Saturday there are no numbers. The state and local numbers are compiled from daily Florida Department of Health reports, but it’s not just about these informational updates but the effect of the snafu across the state.
In a press release, the DOH stated: “today’s daily COVID-19 reports will be delayed until tomorrow.”
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This all happened after the Department of Health stated that they received approximately 400,000 previously-reported COVID-19 test results from Helix Laboratory – a private lab that is not affiliated with the state of Florida.
“The massive size of the data file and the need to de-duplicate hundreds of thousands of results prevented the Department of Health’s automatic reporting system from processing yesterday’s results as it normally does,” the release stated.
The next step is for state epidemiologists to reconcile the data, which the DOH said, will take a day to finish. The daily report is expected to resume Sunday.
The department said the reporting issue will not effect individual’s test results, since the data is just a reporting of tests.
This isn’t the first time the Department of Health has experienced problems with data received from labs. On Sept. 1, there were more than 7,500 additional COVID-19 cases reported, but the number was inflated by a case dump from a lab that was hoarding nearly 75,000 results dating back from April.
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