State-level backlog continues to inflate COVID-19 case numbers across North Texas

DALLAS - Issues with the state’s case reporting system are still causing dramatically higher numbers for some counties, including Collin, Tarrant and Dallas.

Dallas County reported 787 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, but the county says 550 of those cases are backlogged from June and July.

Governor Greg Abbott said on Tuesday that we could continue to see these issues for the next few days. He said the underlying issues causing the backlog have been fixed, but it still might be a few days before the problem corrects itself.

In the meantime, several counties will continue to see large discrepancies in their daily case counts.

Dallas County Health Director Dr. Philip Huang says hospitalizations are holding steady and county testing sites are seeing fewer people with short or even no wait times. County health officials believe that may indicate fewer people are feeling COVID-19 symptoms.

“We’ve leveled off,” Dr. Huang said. “We’re no longer seeing those dramatic increases we were seeing.”

But positive case numbers are still inconsistent because of the state reporting system pushing out backlogged COVID-19 cases from June and July due to an error where some cases previously went unreported.

“But the thing for everyone to remember is the science is sound. The state is working on fixing their coding error, but the science is sound,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins. “We look at every other state and the rest of the globe. Masking works. Six-foot distancing works.”

Gov. Abbott offered an explanation for the backlog, saying the state’s system couldn’t accept more than 45,000 cases a day.

“They have worked with a team to ensure that was increased 4-5 fold,” he said. “Because of that limitation of 45,000 per day, it meant there were hundreds of thousands that did not get timely logged.”

Gov. Abbott said the error has been fixed, but counties could still see higher case counts for the next few days.

Dr. Timothy Bray of the Institute for Urban Policy Research at UT Dallas says there are lessons to be learned from the state’s reporting errors.

“The critical issue here is to figure out what happened, fix the system so it doesn’t happen again, and build in some redundancy so if it does happen,” Dr. Bray said. “We’re not shortcutting our public health function.”

The discrepancies make it hard for businesses and school districts to make decisions off that data, but Dr. Bray says there are other indicators people can look to see the full picture, like hospitalizations and death counts.

“Don’t abandon the data,” Dr. Bray said. “Just sort of recognize that what you’ll see over the next couple of days is the ship righting itself over time.”

The county will also be ending its contract with private testing company Honu at the end of the month because the company was not turning around test results within 72 hours as promised.

Parkland Hospital is expected to take over the testing site at Eastfield College on Sept. 1.

READ MORE: Dallas County ends contract with private COVID-19 testing lab