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Summit County releases new COVID-19 website, altering some of the data

Heather Knappe, a nurse for Centura Health, fills out paperwork after testing a patient for coronavirus at the drive-up community testing clinic at the Vista Professional Building in Frisco on April 28.
Photo by Jason Connolly / Summit Daily archive

KEYSTONE — Summit County officials released a new COVID-19 dashboard Friday, changing some of the numbers that were previously reported.

The webpage now reports 321 total cases and 29 hospitalizations since March 5. On Monday, the county reported 328 cases and 51 hospitalizations.

The new webpage aligns the county’s data with the data collected by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Because the county is now using data that is collected by the state, there will be a five- to seven-day lag in what is reported, which explains the decrease in total case numbers, county data analyst Hayden Hedman said.



The county is now reporting only data related to residents of Summit County. Before the new website was launched, the county reported total hospitalizations, including people who don’t live in Summit County. The 29 hospitalizations reported now represent only people who live in the county.

However, people still can track the hospital’s bed occupancy by viewing the “hospital occupancy and capacity” graph under the milestones tab on the website. According to the graph, 26% of the hospital’s in-patient beds were filled as of Friday, including people whose hospitalizations are unrelated to COVID-19.



The total number of people tested in the county is now at 2,869, which is lower than reported before the new data dashboard launched. The number decreased because it previously included negative test results for people who live outside of Summit County, county spokesperson Julie Sutor said.

“Now we feel much more confident that the number of negatives truly represents Summit County residents and not residents from other counties,” she said.

The main reason for changing the website is to reflect data that the state will use to assess the county’s progress, Sutor said.

Now that the county has standardized its data to go along with the state, it can provide more reliable data, Hedman said.

“The state has a staff of many people like me,” he said. “They’re polishing and reviewing the data. They’re looking at it very meticulously. … They have all these built-in algorithms and built in work to prevent any error, and then they have access to all the information that we previously didn’t.”

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