Changes coming to Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department’s COVID reporting schedule

Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department on Wednesday announced changes to its COVID-19 reporting, moving away from daily case and death counts to more weekly analysis starting Dec. 14.

In dual announcements delivered Wednesday via its blog and during the regular Board of Health meeting, department officials announced the new schedule:

▪ Tuesday: Cases, deaths, hospitalizations and demographics.

▪ Wednesday: Vaccines.

▪ Thursday: Outbreaks, including schools, businesses and long-term care facilities.

The health department already has vaccine and outbreak updates occurring weekly. Daily case and death totals have been in place since March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

“Over time, providing these numbers daily has become less meaningful,” Naomi Wilson, community assessment manager, wrote in Wednesday’s blog for the department. “Our epidemiologists are so busy providing all this data every day, they don’t have much time to respond to new questions and analyze trends that tell us where we are and where we’re headed.

“You’ll see us roll out these changes starting Friday, when we’ll report a daily death toll for the last time. Monday, Dec. 6, you’ll see our final daily case count.”

The graph of cases will change to show weekly counts instead of daily counts to “provide a cleaner look at trends over time,” according to the department.

The state dashboard will continue to be embedded on TPCHD’s dashboard, and it will provide daily updates with its own Pierce County totals.

Another change is a move to report cases “based on the day people were tested rather than the day labs reported the result to us,” according to Wilson in the blog. “Sometimes, labs get backed up and send in a large batch of cases spanning days, weeks or even months. Telling you when people tested positive will give you a more accurate look at the spread of COVID-19 over time.”

Wilson, during Wednesday’s Board of Health meeting, further explained reasons behind the changes.

“A lot of those numbers are not moving very rapidly across time, and it’s more meaningful for us if we’re doing a weekly trend analysis,” Wilson told board members. “And it helps us to be able to have the bandwidth to generate other reports that are really important as we move towards looking at new variants, looking at boosters, adding in other surveillance that we need to do for our COVID response. It utilizes the staff that we have in the most effective way.”

Some of the Board of Health members questioned the timing of the changes, given Wednesday’s detection of the first Omicron variant in California.

“I understand what you’re saying about over time, some of the numbers don’t tell a story,” said board member Marty Campbell. “But when we see an outbreak happening, it tends to rise rather quickly. And I guess my concern would be first week we’re a little concerned. Second week, oh, something’s happening. And by week three, when we look back, we can see that after three weeks we’re pretty far down and we need to start looking at adjusting policies.”

“I think with the new variant coming particularly, I wouldn’t want it to have been here three weeks and we only have three data points to look at,” he said.

Wilson responded: “We will continue to do all the monitoring that we have been doing in this response ... that’s not going to change.”

Department director Dr. Anthony Chen told Campbell that outbreaks analysis and investigations “will continue in real time.”

“What Naomi’s talking about is in terms of recording countywide data, we’re going to be shifting that so the work on cases and outbreaks are going to continue in the background just that we are trying to prioritize where are our data folks, epidemiologists are spending their time and trying to help us in terms of for example generating reports on trends in the county,” Chen said.

Earlier in the session, Kejuan Woods, deputy incident commander for COVID-19 response, offered a glimpse of budget pressures hitting the department.

Pierce County Council approved $10.8 million in American Rescue Plan funding for the department’s 2022 COVID-19 response, $5.5 million for assistance to schools and $2.3 million for isolation and quarantine.

“We appreciate this investment very much, but also note it’s much less than the $31.8 million we requested for our initial COVID-19 response,” Woods said.

“So the pandemic is still there. It’s not going anywhere. New threats like Omicron variant continue to bring new challenges to how we respond. So the funding will keep our current COVID positions through January, but without additional funding, we’ll need to make some significant cuts to our response in February and even more in July,” he said.

“We’ll continue to seek more funding, but we’re planning for all possibilities.”