Texas health department withdraws, corrects public school COVID-19 case data

BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – On Sept. 24, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported the district-by-district data on COVID-19 infections collected by the Texas Education Agency.



a screenshot of a woman: DSHS released a statement on the website detailing the issues.


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DSHS released a statement on the website detailing the issues.

That same day, DSHS withdrew the data, citing “issues.”

Within a few days, a statement was added to the dashboard, acknowledging that nearly 500 cases from Texas public schools had not been initially reported on the website. These cases, the statement says, had been reported to the state by the districts, but because of issues with data integration, had been “inadvertently omitted” from the cumulative total.

Now, the cumulative data has been corrected, and DSHS’s statement promises the corrected district-by-district data on Sept. 28, posted here.

The full statement on the DSHS TEA dashboard is below.

Public schools are required to report positive COVID-19 cases on school campuses. This data will be updated weekly on Wednesdays.

On Sept. 24, issues resulting from the integration of the school COVID case report data set with the school enrollment data set were identified in the school district data file. DSHS and TEA are working diligently to finalize the updated district-level case data file which will be posted on Monday, Sept. 28.

The cumulative total of COVID-19 cases for both students and staff have been updated to reflect case reports which had been submitted by school districts but not previously included in the data. These case reports were submitted by school districts between Aug. 28 and Sept. 2. These case reports were inadvertently omitted from the cumulative total. The number of cases reported for weeks prior to Sept. 20 have been updated to reflect these cases. DSHS updated the cumulative total to reflect the 275 student cases and 203 staff cases that were not previously counted.

KBTX’s previous reporting on the district COVID case data can be found here.

Copyright 2020 KBTX. All rights reserved.

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