Houston Republic

Harris County's daily COVID-19 case reports allegedly have been inflated by the inclusion of months-old cases, according to a Bloomberg investigation.

“These old cases give the impression that the situation is worse than it is,” said Alex Rodriguez, who worked on data that was published on a COVID tracking website launched by The Atlantic. “Houston reporting 600 new cases a day but 450 of those cases being from June and July? How does that help us to know the situation as of right now? It doesn't. At this point it’s just historical record.”

More than 82% of new cases disclosed last week were determined before September and potentially as far back as five months, according to Bloomberg analysis.

“They’re calling them new cases because they are new to them,” Joe Wohleber, a Houston engineer and data analyst, told Bloomberg.  

Wohleber was one of the first to highlight the discrepancies in a series of social media posts.

“What the state did and where it made its mistake was that they counted these tests that it couldn't handle and counted them as part of their dashboard number of molecular tests,” Rodriguez told the Houston Republic.

As of Sept. 14, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) reported on its dashboard that there are 663,445 coronavirus cases statewide and 14,211 fatalities.

But Rodriguez argues that the only numbers that can be generally trusted are the hospitalization numbers, which have reportedly declined by almost 70% since a late-July peak.

“The virus is on its way out,” he said.

A backlog of old test results is what lead to health authorities in Houston overstating the number of new cases, according to media reports.

“We do know that old cases continue to be added to counties like Harris,” said Rodriguez in an interview. “Last week, for instance, they actually broke out for the first time the fact that most of these cases reported today were old cases. Until the pending assignments backlog is cleared, the state case and positivity rate numbers are unusable in regards to understanding where we are in the epidemic.”

The backlog is currently at 400,000 for the state, according to data presented to the Houston Republic by Rodriguez.

“I'm unsure as to why DSHS cannot seem to finish going through the backlog,” he said. “Could be that these tests all have some type of issue with them, incomplete name and address, duplicates, things of that nature, but because the state has not been forthcoming with a full explanation, we cannot tell for certain why this backlog continues to be a problem.”

Houston is reporting 114,761 coronavirus cases and 2,414 deaths on the state dashboard, as of Sept. 12.

“Old cases were added because the state was unable to process them when they originally arrived,” Rodriguez added. “They filed them away and then started looking at them in August, causing confusion at the county level, and inflating the impression of the severity of the outbreaks all over the state.  Plus the published state positivity rate is artificially high, and unfortunately, Gov. Greg Abbott keeps citing below 10% as a metric for reopening the state.  This metric is basically useless as of right now and has been since Aug. 1.”