Data backlog blamed for 224 coronavirus deaths in San Bernardino County reported on Friday – Daily Bulletin

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The number of reported COVID-19 deaths in San Bernardino County increased by 224 on Friday, July 30 – more than double the highest daily toll to date.

But most of those people haven’t died this week, or even this month. Some died over a year ago.

State officials are working on a backlog of records from the past 16 months, so the number of reported deaths from COVID-19 is expected to rise sharply in the coming days, the county says on its coronavirus dashboard.

About 60% of the deaths recorded on Friday occurred in December, January or February – the virus’s winter peak – while others were even earlier, according to data from the dashboard.

The death toll reported on Friday – which represents 0.04% of the 5,075 COVID-19 deaths in the county since the start of the pandemic – is higher than the 172 COVID-19 deaths reported for the remainder of July .

It doubles the previous record for most reported deaths in one day – 103 on March 14.

Officials have warned throughout the pandemic that if the overall pictures of the rise and fall of the disease are accurate, processing delays and occasional errors will cause small fluctuations in the data.

While San Bernardino County sees the winter surge numbers worse than it thought, Riverside County recently found out otherwise, but to a lesser extent.

Riverside County used a computer code donated by the California Department of Public Health to count cases between November and February, when the onslaught of cases made it impossible to manually enter every death in a timely manner. When county officials manually checked the numbers after the outbreak, they found the number of COVID-19 cases to be overestimated by 2,000 – less than 1% of the county’s cases – and the number of deaths less than 10 .

These figures are now corrected.

Riverside County does not expect a sharp increase in reported deaths, said public health spokesman Jose Arballo Jr.

Editor-in-chief Nikie Johnson contributed to this report.

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