Indiana’s state health commissioner is apologizing, after a software error apparently resulted in incorrect COVID-19 positivity rates being reported.
“The error we discovered is in the software logic coding used to calculate our positivity rate,” Dr. Kris Box explained during state officials’ COVID-19 briefing Tuesday. “The error has existed since we began reporting the data. We detected the error about the time that about 600 new labs began reporting into our system, and we’ve been working with outside data scientists to verify the issue and to develop a fix.”
Box said the actual numbers of tests, cases, and deaths reported by the Indiana Department of Health were not impacted, and the state’s positivity trend remains the same.
“Most importantly, I want to say that we are very sorry for this error,” Box added. “I thought it best to notify everyone as soon as we were confident that we understood what had happened and how to fix it.”
Governor Holcomb stressed that the error wouldn’t have impacted any of the decisions that were made.
At the same time, Box said the Indiana Department of Health is changing the way it calculates the seven-day positivity rate. Rather than taking an average of each individual day’s percentage, Box said the state will take all the positive cases reported during a seven-day period and divide it by the total number of tests. “This will help to minimize the effect that a high variability in the number of tests done each day can have on the week’s overall positivity, especially for our smaller counties,” Box explained.
Both the correction of the error and the change in methodology will take effect next Wednesday. Box expects the changes to increase the state’s positivity rate by two to three percent, while lowering the rate in some smaller counties.
