OSDH Announces Changes To COVID-19 Statistics Reporting Dashboard

Despite seeing a decline in cases over the past month, state health officials are reporting over 1,000 daily cases for Friday.  

"We are aware of an excess of 20 states seeing an uptick in COVID cases and they come pretty close to Oklahoma," Oklahoma State Department of Health interim Commissioner of Health Keith Reed said. "We are very aware of that and we have seen the slightest uptick in the past couple of days and we want to watch that.”

But with lower case counts and declining hospitalizations, OSDH officials said now is the time to move to a new dashboard.

"We are continuing to offer valuable data out there this is an evolving pandemic," Reed said. "Some things we can sustain and some things we need to get to a sustainable method in which we can communicate that data."

The new dashboard keeps track of the state's total vaccinations, COVID-19 hospitalizations and ICU admissions in addition to daily cases and county-level data.

Missing from the dashboard are city and zip code specific data.

"City level can be problematic when you start talking about different definitions and where those boundaries are and populations and so forth," said Derek Pate, the Director for the Center of Health Statistics. "So we are going to focus on state and county."

Deaths have also been removed from the new dashboard.

State health officials said those will be moved to another state website called OK2Share, which houses the state's other medical statistics.

"We don't currently have the COVID specific module on the OK2Share system, but we are going through the final clearance process to get that added,” Pate said.

Reed said the changes will allow them to be able to keep track of data as the pandemic moves into an endemic.

"There is a lot of data to a process when it comes to a pandemic response and a lot of resources have to go into that and we need to do what is best for Oklahoma and we need to do it in a way we can sustain it," said Reed.