After the Washington Post reported earlier this week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was missing nearly two weeks’ worth of coronavirus data from the city (including case numbers, testing, and death counts), DC Health released a statement today admitting to the omission of the data.

DC Health normally submits daily coronavirus data both automatically and manually, but “this week, it was discovered that between April 27, 2022 and May 8, 2022, the data that is normally submitted manually was not being submitted to the CDC,” the agency wrote. The data was still being used to calculate community spread levels on the city’s own tracking website, coronavirus.dc.gov, per DC Health.

It’s unclear from the statement why the city stopped manually submitting some of the data to the CDC. A spokesperson for DC Health did not immediately respond to questions from DCist/WAMU.

The city told the Post earlier this week that it was looking into the reason for the missing numbers.

The data has since been restored, according to the statement. Between April 27 and May 8, the city recorded 1,062 new cases and zero deaths — an average of about 88 new cases a day, keeping D.C. in the “low” category of COVID spread, per the CDC’s measurements.

Last week, when DCist/WAMU inquired about missing data, noting that the CDC’s data for the city hadn’t been updated since April 27, a spokesperson pointed DCist/WAMU to the city’s coronavirus website, and said that the next round of data for May 1 through May 7 would be posted by the end of the day on Wednesday, May 11. The spokesperson did not address the missing CDC data.

During the gap in CDC reporting, D.C. was still updating its own dashboard each Wednesday, though those metrics show hospital bed capacities and a case rate (not specific case numbers). These metrics are also reported on a lag — each week’s data reflects cases up to a few days before the date it’s released. As of Wednesday afternoon, the city had not updated its own COVID website, although those numbers should come before the end of the day. They’ll reflect cases tracked in the city up to May 7.

The snag in reporting to the CDC is certainly not the first time the city’s health department has run into a COVID data snafu, but in the past these issues have been resolved within a few days, not nearly two weeks.

For nearly two years, D.C. published daily coronavirus statistics, from case counts, to hospitalization levels, to the number of people who died of the virus, on its COVID website. Journalists (and some COVID-watchers) religiously refreshed the COVID dashboard; during more acute phases of the pandemic, the city’s reopening was even (theoretically) tied to these metrics. But amid the downswing in cases after the omicron surge, D.C. tried to fall in line with federal guidance at the time and shifted to publishing data weekly. Officials said that by reporting sustained trends as opposed to day-by-day totals, residents could better assess their risk level.

After transitioning its own data to a weekly dashboard, the city still sent case counts to the CDC, on what the Post described as a “fairly frequent basis.” These case counts were then published on the CDC’s dashboard for D.C., and were also factored into charts that showed a percentage of increase over seven days  — a helpful measure of spread. With two weeks of missing CDC reporting, and a lag on D.C.’s own COVID dashboard, residents might reasonably feel left in the dark about how to accurately assess their own risk, especially in a post-mask mandate world.

“DC Health dropped [COVID] protections to allow people to make risk-based decisions, and then they took away the tools that helped risk-sensitive people make those decisions,” says Neil J. Sehgal, a public health professor at the University of Maryland. “In a lot of ways that feels like D.C. Health isn’t keeping up their end of the bargain.”

If residents in any local jurisdiction are caught up in a data lag, Sehgal says they can always look at, if possible, more recent data available in the surrounding jurisdictions.

“D.C.’s not surrounded by a moat or a wall,” says Sehgal. “Because people mix across all of those [jurisdictions] what’s happening in our surrounding counties is happening here, too.”

Last Friday, Fairfax County leaders announced that the level of COVID-19 in the community had risen from low to medium, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s metrics, driven in part by outbreaks in schools. In the last week of April, the county reported 74 classroom outbreaks, and 139 in the first week of May. Officials in Loudoun County, which also recently moved into the medium level of community spread, issued a statement on Tuesday urging residents to assess their individual and family related risks “related to the upward trend in case counts.”

Alexandria City and Arlington County are currently in the medium risk category as well. Meanwhile, both Montgomery County and Prince George’s County remain in the “low” category.