N.L. changing how it reports COVID-19 deaths, moving to monthly updates
Health Department marks 5 new deaths, 12 hospitalizations in most recent reporting period
Newfoundland and Labrador's Health Department is changing how it reports COVID-19 deaths, and is reducing the frequency of updates from every two weeks to monthly.
As of Wednesday, the department's online COVID-19 dashboard now displays the number of deaths recorded in the most recent reporting period, as well as the number of deaths outside the recording period that were subsequently found to have occurred due to COVID-19.
"Public Health has considered feedback to aid with ease of interpretation," says Wednesday's media release.
Before the change, the dashboard displayed only the number of deaths within the recording period, while deaths that had occurred outside the reporting period went unannounced, regularly resulting in a discrepancy between the number of deaths announced by the provincial government and the total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 since the previous update.
In a late March update, for example, the Health Department announced zero new deaths, while in actuality six new deaths had been added to the province's total, and the gap between announced deaths and actual deaths grew week by week.
Wednesday's update to the COVID-19 dashboard also removes a breakdown of total deaths by regional health authority — the province's four authorities have been combined into a single authority — but retains the breakdown by age. The dashboard also now includes a graph breaking down the number of deaths by week going back one year.
Wednesday's update also includes new data: five deaths due to COVID-19 over the reporting period of June 18-July 1, with no other COVID-19 deaths outside that period.
The department also reported 12 hospitalizations over those two weeks, including five people in critical care.
Two of the deaths announced Wednesday were people in their 70s, while the remaining three were people 80 or older.
The deaths raise Newfoundland and Labrador's total to 354 since the pandemic began.