The Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) said Wednesday it will soon be receiving results from a large laboratory that had not reported its COVID-19 results to the department.
Because of this delayed reporting, upcoming COVID-19 numbers reported by ADPH will be skewed. More cases will be reported in the coming days, but it does not mean that all of those cases happened recently. “Over the next two cycles of data entry, a large number of cases may be added to the Data and Surveillance Dashboard. Some of these cases will be from previous months,” the ADPH stated in a press release. ADPH says COVID-19 is a notifiable disease, and laboratories are mandatory reporters, which means ADPH does not have control over when results are reported. Other factors affect COVID-19 data being reported to ADPH.