PIERRE, S.D. — South Dakota reported 343 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, Aug. 27, and added more cases that were not reported to the Tuesday and Wednesday, Aug. 25 and 26, numbers.
“The South Dakota Department of Health has identified a reporting aberration that was isolated to the number of new cases and new tests reported to our website on Tuesday and Wednesday this week,” according to a state department of health news release.
“The aberration occurred Sunday evening during the automated geocoding process of new test results received into our electronic disease surveillance system and was identified and corrected by Wednesday evening. The geocoding process is a verification step to ensure the state and county of residence are accurate when test results are received for an individual. The process did not verify state and county of residence in the 1:00 p.m. Monday and 1:00 p.m. Tuesday data used for reporting to the Department’s online dashboard. The data currently presented on the SD-DOH dashboard has been corrected.”
The issue affected only data being reported and did not cause any delays in receiving lab reports, investigating new cases or notifying close contacts, according to the release.
The department began a review of the data Tuesday afternoon, completed the review Wednesday afternoon, implemented a fix to the geocoding process, and added an additional review step to review their reporting process.
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South Dakota Department of Health Secretary Kim Malsam-Rysdon said the recent increase in positive cases is not surprising “with others across the state but our rate of hospitalizations and serious health impacts remains very low.”
The state’s corrected new case reports for Tuesday, Aug. 25, show an increase of 134 cases and the corrected data for Wednesday, Aug. 26, shows 292 new cases.
Active cases are at 2,000 Thursday. There are 75 people currently hospitalized in the state.
The death toll remained the same at 162.
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