The Tompkins County Health Department (TCHD) announced changes Tuesday to its daily COVID-19 data update. TCHD is committed to being transparent with the COVID-19 data and understands the importance of communicating this information to the public as clearly and accurately as possible.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have emphasized that this continues to be an evolving situation, and we greatly appreciate the public’s patience and ability to adapt. The data we collect is a real-time process that is constantly changing. We are making these changes to have a more streamlined process and make sure that we are reporting testing from all labs,” stated Frank Kruppa, Public Health Director.

Since March, TCHD has reported cumulative testing data through the previous day from Cayuga Health System. As testing has become more available in our County, there is need to shift to a different reporting mechanism. Going forward, TCHD will utilize the Electronic Clinical Laboratory Report System (ECLRS), which is a New York State system that collects test results from all labs. The ECLRS data provides testing results (“resulted tests”) as “virus detected” or “virus undetected.” Therefore, the pending results category is removed.

Positive cases have always been reported by the Health Department nurses and will continue to be reported in the same way going forward. The main change in the daily table can be seen in the testing data.

A column will be added for new daily cases and the cumulative positive cases will remain.

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