by Mary Rupert
The positive COVID-19 cases in Wyandotte County declined slightly over the weekend as the Unified Government Health Department adjusted the numbers to account for a change in the way that they are defining confirmed cases.
The positive cases in Wyandotte County went down slightly from Friday to Saturday, according to the UG COVID-19 page. At 10:15 a.m. Friday, April 17, the total was 395 positive cases. That changed to 381 positive cases at 1:20 p.m. Saturday, April 18.
By Monday, the number of positive cases in Wyandotte County had risen again to 426, remaining at 426 at 8:25 a.m. Tuesday, according to the UG’s COVID-19 webpage.
According to Janell Friesen, a spokesman for the UG Health Department, the reason for the decline over the weekend was a different way of counting cases.
“Due to new criteria from KDHE, we had to change who was being included in the confirmed cases counter,” Friesen stated. “Prior to the release of KDHE’s new probable case definition, all cases we were tracking as positive cases were included in that number. On Friday we learned that some of the cases were ‘probable cases’ under the new definition. The cases identified as probable were taken out of the confirmed cases number.”
The cases being investigated are all assigned a status in the Health Department’s reporting system, and only the cases designated as “confirmed” or “probable” will appear on the dashboard, Friesen stated. “It appears that on Friday and Saturday a few cases may have had the status field missing; this may explain the rest of the discrepancy. The missing status fields have since been corrected,” she stated.
There also was another difference more recently, with the state reporting 427 cases and the UG reporting 426 cases in Wyandotte County on Monday. The UG Health Department staff found out that one case was actually a Missouri resident, so it should not be included in the Wyandotte County numbers, Friesen stated.
