PIERRE, S.D. – The South Dakota Department of Health is reporting 343 new cases of COVID-19 infection in the state today – and there’s a reason for the huge increase. Today’s update also includes cases that were not reported on August 25th and 26th due to a reporting aberration.
Health officials say they identified a reporting aberration that was isolated to the number of new cases and new tests reported to their website on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. South Dakota Epidemiologist Dr. Joshua Clayton talks about when the problem occurred.
“The aberration occurred Sunday evening during the automated geocoding process of new test results received into their electronic disease surveillance system and was identified and corrected by Wednesday evening.”
The geocoding process is a verification step to ensure the state and county of residence are accurate when test results are received for an individual. The process did not verify state and county of residence in the 1:00 PM Monday and 1:00 PM Tuesday data used for reporting to the Department’s online dashboard.
The data currently presented on the SD-DOH dashboard has been corrected.
Health officials note that the issue only affected the data being reported on the dashboard and did not cause any delays receiving lab reports, investigating new cases, or notifying close contacts.
So, with two days of missed numbers, the Black Hills area COVID-19 count is high today.
Pennington County has 120 new cases, sending their cumulative total to 1,211 and 289 cases remain active.
Meade County saw 68 new cases, sending the county total to 247 with 133 active cases.
Lawrence County has 42 new cases, sending their total to 171 with 97 active cases. Butte County added 8, giving them a cumulative total of 41 with 22 active and Custer County has 12 new cases for a total of 104 and 56 of them active.
Oglala Lakota County added 6 new cases and Fall River had 5.
The statewide active number of cases is up 487 Thursday to 2,000. The number of people hospitalized is up 17 today to 75.
No new deaths were reported, keeping the state’s death toll at 162.
