The Georgia Department of Public Health published several improvements to the state’s daily COVID-19 status report on Tuesday after weeks of complaints about misleading information, sudden errors and calls from public health experts for more transparency and honesty with how the state releases coronavirus information.
Some of the information published Tuesday still shows inconsistencies.
The department of health announced last week that it would be updating the site only once a day, every day, at the same time. Early in the state’s outbreak, the health department updated new cases every day at noon. The state then changed to twice a day – once at noon and again at 7 p.m. – as the positive case count grew.
After a while, as Georgia ramped up testing, the state started to sporadically update its website as results came in from both public and private labs. This caused confusion for both the health department and the public. The department now says that the daily update will allow time to process and validate laboratory and case reports.
The update also clearly separates molecular PCR coronavirus tests, also known as the swab tests, and the number of serology antibody tests and the number of positives and percent positives for each type of test.