Navicent Data Glitch May Have Left Hundreds Of Macon COVID-19 Cases Uncounted

Caption

The entrance to the emergency room at the Medical Center At Navicent Health.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB

The Georgia Department of Public Health is working to confirm that 578 positive coronavirus cases went unrecorded in Macon-Bibb County over the last six weeks, officials said Tuesday.

That would amount to an average of 96 new cases a week mostly through the month of July, already a peak of local coronavirus spread.

The missing positives came to light following a glitch in the connection between the automated coronavirus test reporting system from the main hospital in Macon, The Medical Center, Navicent Health, to DPH Monday. The glitch pushed out a backlog of 21,000 test records to the state. 

"Navicent Health has been working to automate reporting of its COVID-19 lab test results to the Georgia Department of Public Health," said Navicent spokesperson Megan Allen. "The two systems connected, and the DPH state record system received a large number of automatic reports from The Medical Center, Navicent Health, which appear to have resulted in over reporting of data."

DPH has confirmed about 200 duplicate records out of the 778 positive tests in that larger backlog. 

The news that there was a problem with the data came on the heels of seemed an unprecedented amount of cases for a single day. Had the 778 positives been recorded in the county on a single day, Macon-Bibb County would have accounted for about a third of all the cases in the state on Monday.

 Megan Allen, spokeswoman for Navicent Health, said the hospital group is working with DPH to correct the error.

"We are working closely with DPH and North Central Health District to maintain data integrity," Allen said.

There is no definite timeline for when the data may be corrected.