MACON, Ga. — You may have noticed an alarming increase in COVID-19 cases in Bibb County.
Between Sunday and Monday, the state Department of Public Health reported that Bibb saw an increase of nearly 800 positive COVID-19 cases.
The state blamed a "data dump" from Navicent Health for inflating those numbers.
The dump added 21,000 COVID-19 tests to state records and added 778 positive tests in Bibb County all in one day.
Some of those cases, apparently weeks and months old, go back as far as mid-June.
Since March, Bibb County has averaged around 68 new COVID-19 cases a day.
"Yesterday's spike definitely was something way out of the ordinary," says Michael Hokanson with the North Central Health District.
He says Navicent Health has been working to automate how their system reports lab results to the state.
On Monday, the two systems connected and the hospital added 21,000 electronic lab reports into the Department of Public Health's database.
"What we are having to do right now is to go through and kind of validate the data," says Hokanson. "It's going to take some time since, as I said, it is a substantial amount of data put in the system."
Nancy Nydam, spokesperson with the state DPH told our partners with the Mercer University Center for Collaborative Journalism, they are estimating around 200 of those cases out of 778 are duplicates.
"We know that the numbers are inaccurate and that will affect how people report on those numbers, how they use the data in their own day-to-day planning," says Hokanson.
We reached out to Navicent Health spokesperson Megan Allen asking about the data dump and she told us up until now, they were reporting their numbers manually.
She says the vast majority of the results had already been uploaded to the DPH database, but were then duplicated by the automatic upload from the third party.
Allen went on to say a handful of the data included test results that were collected over the weekend and scheduled to be uploaded on Monday.
She also says, "We are continuing to work closely with the DPH to maintain data integrity and accurate reporting. We can say that the automated system is now functioning appropriately."
"It definitely drew a lot of attention which caused the investigation to definitely spark up and make sure we had some kind of answer," says Hokanson.
As we've been telling you since this spring, Navicent has repeatedly declined to release information about the pandemic to the public.
Information such as how many cases they've handled, if they are treating patients outside of Central Georgia or how many beds are being taken up by COVID-19 patients.