Covid-19 in Saint Charles County - Graphs

Below is a collection of graphs that I have created to show several different data points that I find helpful in tracking this disease in the county. You can read some of my notes about the data in these charts here.

Covid-19 Data Issues in Saint Charles County

May 22 Update:
I reached out to the County Health Department about this discrepancy and received the following reply/explanation:

The County’s health and information systems departments did switch reporting systems recently and noticed an error in the presentation of reported numbers. This caused the issue you note, and this was corrected as soon as possible.

I am not sure if the switch refers to the update to the PowerBI dashboard or if it refers to the actual source they are collecting the data from. I have not nioticed any updates the the actual layout or content of the dashboard, so i assume it is the data source. If the change in source resulted in a greater than 5% negative change in reported cases, then there seems to be valid reason for concern with the validity of the numbers that have been previously reported.

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Original post:
I have been tracking the spread of Covid-19 in St. Charles County since the day the first case was announced. For several weeks, the County only had a table of current data on the site, so I was manually tracking daily case totals in a spreadsheet in order to see the trends. Finally, the County utilized PowerBI to provide some graphs of the data in a dashboard format. However, the County had not created some of the graphs that I thought helped better tell the story, so I continue to input and update daily new cases and deaths into my spreadsheet, all based on the published County data.

Over the course of this pandemic, firm numbers regarding positive cases, and even deaths, have been hard to establish. For Saint Charles County, the tale is no different. Most days, I have to scroll back though the previous days and update a few up or down by 1 or 2 cases. Typically, most of the changes occur to dates within the past 14 days, which makes sense, as this is within the window of symptoms presenting and test results being obtained. However, over the past week, I have noticed that the numbers are changing on dates much further back in time. 

Active Cases of Covid-19 in St. Charles County

Currently, the County website continues to show cumulative case numbers and does not show active case numbers. I have been tracking this data for over a month and present the below for reference.

Updated 06MAY20

Current Cumulative Cases: 637

Current Active Cases: 126

You can view the entire collection of my graphs that are updated regularly here.

Covid-19 Graph Notes

I have published some of the charts that I have created about Covid-19 in St. Charles County, MO. level data. Below are a couple of notes about how I arrived at some of my data points.

Notes:

• I have utilized the daily death total that I have been tracking on my own, as the county still does not publish them in a table at the daily level. 
• Due to the unavailability of the Recovery data at the county level, I have assumed the standard 14 day recovery window for all cases. I realize that this is variable, but for consistency sake and trend analysis, I felt like this data point was useful.
• I have calculated the number of Active Cases as follows:
• Active Cases = Yesterday's Active Cases + Today's New Cases - Today's Deaths - 14 Day Prior Daily Delta (Defined : Daily New Cases - Daily Deaths Announced)