Today, the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) changed the source used for the data displayed for Saline County, Missouri. This change affects the data for cases and deaths. It does not affect data for testing or hospitalizations.
Previously, the source used for Saline County was the Show Me Strong Public Health Dashboard published by the State of Missouri. We have worked closely with local public health leadership in Saline County to ensure the data we display is timely and complete.
After much consideration, we are changing our source to the Saline County-level page of the University of Missouri’s All Thing’s Missouri COVID-19 Dashboard.
Benefits of moving to this new source include:
- Retrieving data in a direct, nightly feed from the Saline Public Health Department. This aligns with the MARC priority to publish data that is vetted directly by the local health department.
- Substantially improving the timeliness of death data.
- Including probable cases identified with antigen testing. (State-level reporting excludes probable cases). This is valuable because many cases in Saline County are identified through antigen testing in local long-term care homes.
What you’ll see on the Data Hub due to this change includes:
- All historical data for cases in Saline County will be backdated to show previously untracked cases. This will change the historical data shown to be more accurate about past conditions.
- There will be a temporary, one-time spike in deaths for Saline County as the newly tracked deaths are added. We will work with the local public health department to update historical data over time. That will include attributing deaths to their date of occurrence.
- Total cases and deaths in Saline County (and the HCC North-South region) will show higher counts than previously reported. These cases will show as newly reported but it will not mean those cases and deaths have occurred in the last 24 hours.