State Health Dept. Changes How COVID-19 Death Numbers Are Reported

The state health department changed which numbers it uses for the daily report of deaths from COVID-19. They’re starting to use numbers from the CDC, which are updated faster.

That led to a big jump in the total deaths reported and a clearer look at the toll of COVID-19 for the last few months.

Wednesday, the new numbers show 7,035 deaths in Oklahoma. On Tuesday, the state numbers showed a death toll of 4,534.

The CDC uses death certificates, while the state undertakes a longer investigation of each case.

"There's a significant backlog in addition to the complexity of assigning deaths, that has contributed to a significant disparity between them and as a result we've seen a jump in the seven-day rolling average of deaths, which is a falsenomer, because we have some deaths from September that are just hitting the books," OSU COVID researcher Dr. Jennifer Clark said.

The change doesn't impact new cases.

The state health department is reporting 747 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours and 457 people are hospitalized with the virus as of Wednesday.