Spike in virus numbers related to delayed reporting

Marengo County recorded a record number of daily cases of COVID-19 Friday, with a spike in reports on Saturday and Monday also.

The statistics, however, probably were skewed by a lapse in reporting, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH).

The last time the county recorded daily cases in the double digits was Aug. 10, when 13 cases were reported. On Friday the case total was 93. Another 25 were registered on Saturday, and 16 on Monday.

According to its website, the ADPH receives reports of testing from commercial and clinical laboratories as well as its own Bureau of Clinical Laboratories (BCL). While ADPH has long-term reporting relationships with many labs in Alabama and other states, new labs have begun to provide testing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There have been instances where ADPH was not aware of some of these laboratories, and these labs were not familiar with mandatory reporting of notifiable diseases.

When ADPH becomes aware of new labs performing testing, the department educates them regarding uploading data in a timely, accurate electronic format. As these labs were not reporting to ADPH until they understood the requirement, their data contains older reports which increases case numbers.

ADPH continues to make all efforts possible to identify new labs and bring them into the electronic reporting process in order to capture the positive and negative labs for case investigation and data accuracy.