15 July 2020 — 0504 mdt

Montana’s convoluted system for dispensing Covid-19 data

Every morning, a few minutes after ten o’clock, I receive an email from Montana’s Joint Information Center. It contains information on Covid-19 cases reported the previous day. Here’s a screenshot from yesterday’s email, which reported 109 new Covid-19 cases in Montana:

Additional information is provided at Montana’s Covid map page, on MT DPPHHS's demographics page, which includes a link to the state’s 26 June analysis of Covid-19 cases (PDF), and on county health department pages such as Flathead County’s.

These case updates would be more useful if they included the town as well as the county, and the actual age instead of a decadal age range. One gets the sense that the people compiling the updates would, in their zeal to protect privacy, prefer not releasing what is now being released. That’s not surprising. I suspect they’re still in a pre-pandemic mindset and have a difficult time understanding that some individual privacy must be sacrificed for the good of the community.

The first of these emails arrived on 30 March. It did not provide the date in the table of new cases. But it did provide a link to an Excel spreadsheet containing the county, age range, and sex, data for the first 173 cases, beginning with 11 March and ending on 29 March. The spreadsheet is still online, but has not been updated. We who receive the daily email are expected to update the spreadsheet ourselves.

Asking the recipients of the email to update the record may not appear to be a problem, but it is. The daily tallies of new tests and lists of new cases are not always correct. For example, the 8 July email reported 1,094 new test for 7 July, and the 9 July email reported 1,094 new tests for 8 July. The number for 7 July was correct, but the number for 8 July actually was 2,344. I suspected something was wrong — the probability of two consecutive days with the same number of tests is quite low — but I was not able to obtain the correct value until I downloaded the data for Montana from the Covid Tracking Project. The CTP gives Montana a “C” for current data quality.

Note. The CTP assigns data to the date they were received from Montana. For example, CTP assigns the data for 6 July to 7 July. To correct this in a spreadsheet, sort the date column in ascending order (earliest date at the top), then shift the date column down one row.

The JIC should provide the entire record in its email updates

The state of Montana obviously maintains some kind of central database of Covid-19 cases and tests. There is absolutely no reason why the Joint Information Center’s morning email update could not include an Excel spreadsheet of the data from 11 March through the present. That would be immensely helpful as it not only would contain the current, corrected, set of cases and tests, it would eliminate the need for users to update the record, a daily process that’s an invitation for error.

I’ve submitted a request for the full data set, but thus far the JIC is balking, grumbling about the time providing the information would take, and professing not to understand what I’m requesting. I’m not sure whether my request will be honored, but there is absolutely no reason why it should be denied or only partially granted. I’m going to continue working to persuade the JIC that my request is reasonable, and that the entire record should be provided in the daily update emails.