Prognosis
Houston’s Daily Covid-19 Tally Inflated by Months-Old Cases
- Local health officials point to messy backlog of testing data
- Governor of second-largest U.S. state close to relaxing rules
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Houston-area health authorities are overstating the number of new Covid-19 cases as data teams struggle to work through a backlog of old test results in the third-largest U.S. county.
On an almost daily basis, Harris County Public Health releases a tally of what it calls “new cases.” A Bloomberg analysis found they include hundreds of diagnoses that are weeks or months old. On Wednesday, for example, more than 82% of the new cases disclosed were actually detected prior to this month and some dated as far back as May.