WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:53 — 5.1MB)
The backlog shows a 70% increase in cases and a statistical inconsistency.
By Aaron B. Comforty
Updated: February 11th, 2021
Indiana University Bloomington added more than 3,200 previously unreported positive Covid-19 test results to it’s Covid-19 dashboard website on Wednesday, February 3rd. The batch of unreported cases brings Indiana University’s flagship Bloomington campus’ all-time Covid-19 case count to 7,593, a 70% increase. It remains to be seen whether Monroe County, which is home to the university, will add any of the roughly 3,200 cases to its own case total.
Days before the university published the backlogged cases, WFHB reported that Indiana University Bloomington’s all-time case count stood at about 4,200. Associate Vice President for Enterprise Systems at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, confirmed WFHB’s 4,200 cases figure in a February 4th email, noting “We agree that the previously published positive numbers totaled roughly 4,200… The difference between the 4,200 and 7,593 are made of Voluntary Testing Positives… [and] Other known cases – 3,126.”
The explanation Vice President Aaron Neal provided clarifies where the newly reported cases come from, but the numbers don’t seem to add up perfectly. Indiana University Spokesperson, Dr. Chuck Carney, wrote in an email to WFHB, “As you can imagine, building such a project from scratch presents challenges, and changes, such as we have made, can result in finding some things to shore up.”
On February 3rd, 2021, the university revamped its dashboard to include a number of new sections, features, and statistics. One of them was an “all-time” cases figure. Previously, the university opted to separate the all-time cases figure into three distinct testing categories, in effect obscuring the all-time case count. The university’s approach to its dashboard varied significantly from the State of Indiana’s dashboard, which has had an all-time case count since the early days of the pandemic.
Vice President Aaron Neal also indicated that the majority of the roughly 3,200 newly reported cases come from a section titled, “Other Known Cases.” An explanation in the university’s Covid-19 dashboard describes the contents of the Other Known Cases section in the following terms, “Students, faculty, and staff are required to self-report all positive COVID-19 test results obtained outside of IU testing mechanisms.” The cases in that section consist of those “outside” positive test results.
The Indiana University Covid-19 dashboard puts the number of “all-time other known cases” at 3,126. However, a WFHB analysis of reporting totals, contained in the Weekly Trends bar chart subsection of Other Known Cases, found that only 65%, or 2,020 of those 3,126, cases are accounted for in the graph. The source(s) of the remaining 1,106 cases are not given on the dashboard.
Vice President Aaron Neal responded to a question about that statistical inconsistency in an email to WFHB, writing, “We believe this is because the bar chart was time bound to 8/23/2020, and there are actually more cases prior to that date that total to the 3,126. ” Most of the remaining 1,106 cases were almost certainly not contracted or transmitted on campus, as Indiana University shut down its campuses in March, when testing was unavailable, and didn’t reopen them until late August, when the university began pub lishing its testing data.
Indiana University’s dashboard does not specify whether the university knew of these previously unreported cases as they were discovered, or if it learned about some or all of them considerably after they were discovered.
When pressed for comment, university Spokesperson Dr. Carney wrote in an email to WFHB, “This dashboard has evolved over time, as you might expect. This was something built from scratch for a circumstance we didn’t foresee. As a part of this process we also didn’t know how many self reports we might get outside our regular mitigation testing. So while we have given the most important numbers thoroughly and completely since we began this… We did gather more numbers that came from outside sources. As with other items we’ve added to the dashboard, these are data points some of our constituents have asked to be added and we’ve now done so to provide as complete a picture as we can.”
