Health district investigating discrepancy with CDC COVID data

The Southern Nevada Health District is looking into a data discrepancy that shows Clark County in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “high” transmission tier, a health official said Wednesday.

CDC data showed the county in the highest transmission tier on Tuesday because it had a case rate over 100 per 100,000 people. Cassius Lockett, director of disease surveillance and control for the health district, said at a Wednesday briefing that officials believe the CDC’s numbers are incorrect.

“We are currently investigating the data discrepancy that shows that community transmission is high on the CDC website,” he said. “We have reached out to our state partners, and we have reached out to CDC to explore this further.”

The rise in case rate had coincided with a continued drop in seven-day test positivity rate, the other metric used by the CDC to designate a county’s risk level. On Wednesday, the case rate stood at 194.78, while the seven-day test positivity rate showed another drop to 5.77 percent. Those numbers should not be going in opposite directions, Lockett said.

According to Lockett, the CDC data suggests that the county recorded about 700 cases per day last week, a number that is significantly higher than the metrics the health district was reporting to the state and CDC.

Officials are still not sure why the CDC numbers appear to be significantly higher than the ones reported by the county.

“We don’t know what caused it, we don’t know where this occurred,” Lockett said. “It’s still under investigation.”

The county should be in the “moderate” tier, Lockett said. That tier is the second-lowest of the four possible.

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan@reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter.