Alabama saw an overnight 50 percent increase in COVID-19 cases earlier this week.
The reason may be over 4,000 backlogged cases dating from October of last year. The cases were reported last Monday.
Dr. Karen Landers is the District Medical Officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health. She said they do not have control over entities reporting their numbers to the department.
“They are required to report in and there may be backlogs that occur from time to time where information was not put into the system,” she said.
Landers said they have to add those numbers when they are received but there is a way to read their site that makes sense of what looks like a spike.
“If you look on tab 7A on our dashboard you’ll see the case by onset of illness, as opposed to case by report which helps us to be able to clarify when those cases occurred as opposed to making it appear as those we had four thousand cases occur yesterday,” she said.
Landers said there is some good news on the horizon. Alabama will be expanding eligibility for who can get a vaccine near the end of the month.
So far, Alabama has administered over 1.3 million doses of the vaccine.