CORONAVIRUS, VACCINE UPDATE FROM GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH

The Georgia Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 Daily Status Report is back on track, following a week of issues with electronic laboratory reporting to begin this new year. According to a media release by the agency:

The Georgia Department of Public Health’s (DPH) Daily Status Report updated as scheduled Monday and accurately reflects case and test data. Issues with electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) that were identified last week have been thoroughly investigated and the problem fixed. It is important to note that data for case counts, hospitalizations and deaths come from sources other than ELR, and as such were not impacted by the problem.

Background

Everyday tens of thousands of records are reported to DPH through ELR. Laboratory reports are assigned an ELR classification – they are categorized as positive or negative or inconclusive. If a laboratory report has incorrect or incomplete information, the system does not assign an ELR classification. Reports that do not receive a classification are further reviewed and manually classified.

Over the course of the pandemic response, ~2.6M reports have required manual classification.

The Problem

Due to ongoing high transmission rates of COVID-19 and the Omicron variant, and the associated increase in testing, the system processing ELR became overwhelmed by the unprecedented number of reports coming in over New Year’s weekend. The system came to a near standstill. Processes that would normally take 3 minutes were taking 5 hours to complete.

To speed up those processes, a change was made to the coding application. As a result of that change, all reports were recounted from the beginning of the pandemic response. The recount included the 2.6M reports that required manual classification, as if they had never been manually categorized, and date stamped them January 4, 2022. Those 2.6M reports were incorrectly reflected in the “PCR/Molecular Reported Today” column on the Daily Status Report; and upon further investigation they also appeared in charts and graphs where information was sorted by collection date, in this case January 4, 2022.

Out of an abundance of caution, updates to the Daily Status Report were suspended.

The Resolution

Once the coding issue was identified as the root cause of the problem, it was fixed, and extensive testing and verification of the system was completed over the past four days. The dashboard updated today at 3 p.m. on its normal schedule. Monday’s dashboard reflects all data since the previous update on January 5, 2022, resulting in very high numbers.

A total of 79,739 new cases of coronavirus and 118 more virus-related deaths were reported across Georgia on Monday by the state’s Department of Public Health.

According to the latest update by the DPH issued just before 3 pm, there have been 1,572,899 confirmed cases of COVID-19 statewide since the beginning of this pandemic. The state’s death toll now stands at 26,589. The number of confirmed cases totaled 18,447 in Floyd County, which has additionally had a total of 329 fatalities. Fulton County has had the most confirmed cases in this state with 154,718 and the most deaths with 1,737.

As of the most recent update to the vaccine dashboard Monday, 13,654,609 vaccines have been administered across the state; 61 percent of all Georgians have received at least a dose of the vaccine, while 53 percent have been fully vaccinated. Among those fully vaccinated Georgians, 34 percent have had an additional dose; 18 percent of residents statewide have had the booster.

Get more information about COVID-19 and vaccination in Georgia from the state Department of Public Health website at www.dph.georgia.gov.