North Coastal News

With news in June that a surge of COVID-19 cases was occurring in Harris County, statistician Joe Wohleber began to monitor the data daily. He found discrepancies in the number of cases being posted on Texas' dashboard.

“It's not necessarily nefarious or anything,” said Wohleber, an engineer who works for an oil and gas company in Houston. “It's just a product of a huge state backlog that’s working itself out and if they’re just accepting data that is given to them and doing their job to process the data, it's not necessarily their job to think about how they're presenting it or to give more context to it.” 

Wohleber is among a number of Twitter sleuths who are keeping county and state officials accountable with daily tweets about the state's coronavirus case count.

For example, on Sept. 21 @EthicalSkeptic tweeted, “TX dumped 10,000 positive detects on us today, artificially boosting the positives reported for today. We normalized this and show we are still at 1.9% percent positive over the last three days. Actual positives are in a 1% decline.”

To which Wohleber from @JoeWo responded, “Get ready for tomorrow because Harris County dumped 14,000 positives today. Those will be reported at the state level tomorrow. Most of these are older cases.”

As of Sept. 23, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported 716,207 cases and 14,994 fatalities statewide. Wohleber, however, believes the daily new case numbers are inflated.

“Lately more and more counties are starting to flag which cases are recent and which cases are old in their daily reporting to DSHS,” Wohleber told North Coastal News in a recent interview. “Of the 9,853 cases reported yesterday, less than 2,000 of them were new. DSHS reported 1,742 new cases, but keep in mind not all counties are providing the split between recent and old so the true new case count is actually lower than 1,742.”

While Texas is using positive molecular tests to determine coronavirus cases, positive antigen and antibody tests do not count toward confirmed cases, which doesn’t concern Wohleber.

“The problem is the state doesn't provide the date of when those cases occurred so you can't determine new cases from old cases unless the counties provide those details to the state," he said. "Those notes from the counties show up in the trends tab and on the dashboard for that day's reporting.

How the data is aggregated is important to Wohleber because he argues that it’s being used to make many important decisions.

“By the time we really started locking down in Texas, we almost were already past our peak of cases in early July and hospitalization started falling in late July which is a delayed metric," he said. "Now we’re still waiting for the dust to settle from all the unreliable data that we've been getting, which has prolonged the lockdown if nothing else is. We need politicians to make actual, brave decisions on things and not just pull the safety card without recognizing there’s a huge cost on the other side of the equation.”