3 week lag in Covid data presented to the board

Did you know that Boise School District used COVID community transmission data that lagged the actual data by 3 weeks when they presented to the board on Nov 8?

Notice the peak in the CDC data occurring the week ending Oct 8, but the actual peak occurred the week starting Sept 12, according to the CDH dashboard.

According to Central District Health, the CDC data is provided to district administrators on a weekly basis to use for planning and decision-making in the near future.

The CDC reports, rather than the CDH dashboard, are used for consistency and are more accurate than the CDH Dashboard AT THE TIME when there are a high number of cases, causing a back-log in reporting. However, it seems that this method becomes inaccurate as time moves on since the CDH Dashboard is continually updated to account for the reporting backlog, but the weekly CDC reports are not.

How do we know the week starting Sept 12 peak in cases is more likely accurate than the week ending Oct 8 peak? Because the peak is visible that week on both the CDH public dashboard and the Idaho Public Dashboard and because the peak in hospitalizations occurred the week of Sept 24. It is typical to see a peak in hospitalizations occur roughly two weeks after the peak in diagnosed cases, but very unlikely that the peak in hospitalizations would occur a week BEFORE the peak in cases, as is the case with the CDC data presented by the district.

*Please note this blog post was updated on 2/1/22, after blog authors noticed that images did not upload and publish correctly. All images added were current at the time of the original post and were the images intended for the initial publication.