OH Ditches Covid Counter

An outdated reporting system that led to the undercount of more than 4,200 COVID-19 deaths in Ohio will now be retired. The Ohio Department of Health will shelve the manual system it used to provide a real-time death toll from the pandemic over the last year…after a breakdown in the system led to a massive adjustment last month to the state’s documented death toll. Now…the department will switch…to rely exclusively on a slower but more reliable and accurate system to count virus-related deaths. It had used this slower process as a quality check to reconcile the data from the manual system that failed. The shift will result in only confirmed, instead of probable, deaths being listed every few days, instead of probable deaths, listed daily.