Oklahoma Dept. of Health switching from reporting COVID-19 daily to weekly

by: Hicham Raache

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – The Oklahoma State Department of Health is switching to reporting state COVID-19 data on a weekly rather than daily basis.

OSDH has released Oklahoma’s latest COVID-19 numbers, including new cases, deaths and hospitalizations, for the past year.

But now, OSDH officials will provide that data to Oklahoma’s COVID-19 dashboard on Wednesdays only.

OSDH released the following statement about the change:

“A number of changes have been made, starting this week, to the state’s COVID-19 data dashboard. These changes are intended to better represent Oklahoma’s COVID-19 data to the public,” said Joli Stone, Deputy State Epidemiologist. “After a year of reporting daily numbers in many categories, with cases, deaths and hospitalizations all trending downward, and vaccination continuing to trend upward, we believe now is a good time to switch to weekly reporting. Data transparency has been and will continue to be important to OSDH, no matter the cadence of reporting.”

OSDH is implementing the following changes:

Immunization data

• The total vaccine doses administered figure now matches the CDC’s published total, which includes federally administered doses. For this reason, this figure will be larger than Oklahoma’s prime and boost doses combined, which only reflects the state administered doses.
• The count of allocated vaccine doses to the state has been removed from the dashboard. As vaccine administration progresses, intricacies in reporting this data without extensive context mean it is not a consistently accurate figure to reference.

CDC data 

• Cases from the CDC COVID tracker and 7-day case average have been added to the dashboard.
• Deaths from CDC/NCHS provisional death certificate data (i.e., deaths with any mention of COVID-19) have been added to the dashboard.

OSDH case investigation data

• All numbers in this section will now be updated on a weekly basis, rather than daily, along with the underlying dashboards and downloadable data.
• This is a similar move like we recently made with COVID-19 death reporting
• A daily case number will still be included Monday – Friday in the Situation Update.

Other planned changes

• We plan to change the date the Weekly Epidemiology Report is distributed, Alert Map is updated and weekly vaccine data is refreshed. These reports will be published weekly on Wednesdays and will reflect the previous week’s data.