State COVID tracking map disparities being worked on

The Montana Department of Health and Human Services appears to be experiencing a technical issue that has caused a significant disparity between the COVID-19 numbers being reported by the Hill County Health Department and the state.

In the past few weeks DPHHS’ COVID-19 tracking map has reported significantly fewer cases than the Hill County Health Department has, but in recent days has been reporting significantly more.

Hill County Public Health Director Kim Berg, also the county’s health officer, said last week that the state has been working to fix the issue causing this difference.

Daily emails from the health department say, “We are currently working with MT DPHHS to figure out the issue causing the discrepancy in numbers between what we report and what’s on the state map. We hope to have this issue corrected quickly.”

The Havre Daily News attempted to contact Berg and DPHHS to find out if the recent numbers reported by the state, far higher than the department’s, are the result of a backlog being addressed and what has been causing the previous disparities, but neither responded by print deadline this morning.

Blaine County Public Health Nurse Jana McPherson-Hauer said her department is seeing a disparity between their numbers and the state’s but it is not dramatic enough to be problematic at this point.

McPherson-Hauer said if people want to stay as up to date as possible on COVID-19 in their communities they should primarily pay attention to the numbers those communities report rather than the state.

“The most accurate numbers are the ones that your locals are reporting,” she said.

She said while the disparity in Blaine County is not dramatic they have experienced significant problems like Hill County’s current predicament before and they keep track of the difference between their numbers and the state’s to make sure they don’t get to far away from each other.

She said while she doesn’t and wouldn’t know if any other jurisdictions are seeing the same problem Hill County is right now, it seems many have throughout the pandemic.

“It seems to affect different jurisdictions at different times,” McPherson-Hauer said.

She said it’s important to know that departments like hers are not just giving the state the number of cases they have at any given time, but comprehensive data on each individual case.

She said this ends up being a lot of data and submittal errors do sometimes happen.