By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — If you follow the county's COVID-19 dashboard regularly, you may have noticed that some areas of the site, particularly the community positive test rate, haven't changed in recent days. That's because updating some portions of the dashboard was put on the back burner because of other priorities recently.
"I like to do it twice a week," said county data analyst DJ Gering. "The problem with this last two weeks, I haven't done it, and that's just because I've been tied up in the vaccine prep and vaccination planning. My goal this week is to get back on track and get all of that data cleaned up so I can start updating that more regularly again."
It's important to remember that Gering has to do the updating himself for certain areas of the dashboard where the data is entered locally.
"I'm only one person," Gering said. "It's difficult for me to get to everything all the time, especially right now. I think that now that there's a vaccine plan in place and we're able to have these processes there, I think I can get back into the data cleanup and updating far more often than I was."
Though data that comes in from outside, like from KDHE can in some respects go in automatically, Gering still has checks and balances in the system.
"Part of it still is manual," Gering said. "I have what's called a quality assurance check. There are certain variables or fields that are sometimes missed or often missed. When they are, that prints out on a report and then I get into those records."
The death number changes either when patients in the local hospital who are being monitored as local cases die. If local officials are unsure, they wait on verification from KDHE through death certificates that are sent to the office of vital statistics, so it is possible that someone could die and the family would know it was from COVID-19, but that number might not change immediately, either because they are between checks or because they are waiting for verification.
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