The Iowa Department of Health announced that a programming error has greatly understated the number of recent coronavirus cases in the state and lessened the known spread of the virus, the Associated Press reports.
The error led to an underreporting of cases recently identified, pushing the into old data tables that recorded the cases as happening in March, April, May and June. This gave an inaccurate impression that the coronavirus wasn’t hitting the state as badly as it actually was.
Potentially thousands of cases were misreported as local school districts and state officials were making decisions on whether or not to open schools to in-person classes this month.
“It’s just horrifying. We have no idea what’s going on, really,” said Dana Jones, an Iowa City nurse practitioner who uncovered the problem.
The problem apparently revolves around people who earlier had tested negative for the virus, but later became infected. The database overwrote their previous test results instead of recording them as new cases.
Because it still recorded the cases as “positive”, the glitch does not impact the overall number of cases reported, which numbers about 52,000 in Iowa. It does, however, “shift the curve” to show more cases currently and in the recent past. The exact extent of this shift if unknown until all the data are reviewed.