Nevada no longer updating COVID-19 metrics on weekends

Nevada will no longer update its COVID-19 “dashboard” on weekends, the state announced Friday.

The state will continue to update the website where it displays its COVID-19 data Monday through Friday, but the new policy means numbers on Monday and Tuesday will be inflated, as the state reports all the new cases, deaths and updates to other metrics gathered from Friday through Sunday.

State officials said the change was made because some rural jurisdictions and other participants in the state’s testing and vaccination program have stopped reporting data on weekends, skewing data reported early in the week.

The reduction comes as the state’s key COVID-19 metrics have been slowly climbing for the last two weeks.

The test positivity rate, which essentially tracks the percentage of people tested for COVID-19 who are found to be infected, has risen steadily since April 3, when it reached a recent low of 4.2 percent. On Friday, it was at 5.7 percent, its highest level since March 14.

Nevada also reported 536 new COVID-19 cases and six deaths on Friday. It was the second straight day the state had reported over 500 new cases.

Caleb Cage, Nevada’s COVID-19 response coordinator, pointed people who want to follow the indicators closely to the trends section of the dashboard instead of the raw numbers tabs.

“The trends tab on the dashboard and the average metrics continue to be the most reliable view of the data, as it accounts for reporting delays or other daily data anomalies,” he said.

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