VDH Playing Catch Up

by Carol J. Bova

The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) has made two major recent changes on the COVID-19 dashboard.

On June 15, under Race and Ethnicity in the demographics tab, VDH moved about 20,000 cases between categories and added 380 total new cases.

Category              Cases reduced by…    To                 New % of Total Cases

White                               6,051                  11,266                20.5%
Other                            10,997                     1,455                  2.7%
Not Reported                3,245                  13,837                25.2%

Four new categories:

Asian/Pacific Islander                               1,862                    3.4%
Latino                                                          18,580                33.9%
Native American                                              65                   0.1%
Two or more                                                   138                   0.3%


Interestingly, the Black category lost many fewer than the others, showing an increase of 28.

Black                                                            7,683                 14.0%
Total:                                                         54,886

Now if VDH could identify the nearly 14,000 still in the Unknown category, there might be a chance of understanding any differences in racial/ethnic impacts of COVID-19.

On June 12, the other change was to manually enter 43,000 faxed PCR lab tests and results by the lab report date, not previously in the testing count. The resulting graph shows the uneven and slow increase in the rate of testing. What it can’t show is almost 3,800 tests with 1,660 positive results that had no date, but are included in the total PCR test encounter number of 476,573.

Carol Bova is a writer living in Mathews County.