Every night, Prakash Parameswran goes online to comb through COVID-19 data on the Texas Department of State Health Services dashboard and update his Collin County neighbors about the state of the pandemic.
Parameswran isn’t an elected official or a data scientist. He’s an engineer. But like many other Collin County residents, he’s concerned about the local spread of the virus. After officials voted to remove local data from the county’s coronavirus dashboard — leaving only hospitalization data and a link to the state’s numbers — Parameswran took it upon himself to keep his neighbors informed about seven-day case averages and deaths.
This has become Parameswran’s nightly routine: updating spreadsheets, calculating and graphing averages, and posting his findings to the neighborhood networking site Nextdoor for others to see. He said it’s critical for people to have easy access to data trends to weigh risks and make responsible decisions for themselves and on behalf of their families and their neighbors.
“To me, this is what I want from a county executive,” Parameswran said. “But they’re not doing that. They’re just letting … [COVID-19] rip through the population. And if you do the numbers, it’s pretty depressing, right?”
With more than 1 million residents, Collin County is the most populous county in Texas to rely entirely on the state to manage its COVID-19 case data.
While Dallas, Tarrant and Denton counties have directed staff members to provide the public with detailed data and conduct contact tracing, Collin County Health Care Services focuses on providing guidance to local schools and businesses, preparing for vaccine distribution, and some “minor contact tracing,” said Darrell Willis, the department’s public information officer.
Now, as the virus surges to new heights across North Texas, Collin County residents must find alternative means to inform themselves.
Differentiating the data
For months, members of the Collin County Commissioners Court have challenged the accuracy of data compiled by the state. But the county’s own public health officials have pointed out ways to rectify irregularities.
Counties receive case results from a wide range of sources — among them the state’s electronic laboratory reporting system, individual labs, physicians’ offices, testing sites and more. Each newly reported case has a specimen collection date. The health departments in many counties, including Dallas, use that date to accurately classify cases as new or older. This involves confirming jurisdictions and removing probable cases that were later confirmed with molecular tests.
These practices allow county health departments to report results more precisely, even when the state adds a large number of backlogged cases, as it did in early August.
However, as Collin County health care coordinator Sam Grader said at an Oct. 19 meeting, the county’s commissioners have required that health authorities report data exactly as the Department of State Health Services does, without honing it further.
“Could we not parse that out to give the public better information?” Precinct One Commissioner Susan Fletcher, who voted against scaling back the dashboard, asked at the meeting.
Grader responded that without the mandate, the health department could differentiate the data. In fact, it’s what Dallas County does on a daily basis.
“I think that falls back to what the Commissioners Court decides,” Grader said in the meeting.
With the massive number of cases that the state processes every day, it’s difficult for the state to avoid backlogged cases entirely, said Chris Van Deusen, a Department of State Health Services spokesman.
“This is an unprecedented effort to wrangle all of this data and bring it all together and report it to the public on a daily basis, so they can see what’s happening with coronavirus in their communities and across Texas,” Van Deusen said. “As with anything that involves both numbers as well as information technology resources, there are going to be hiccups and there are going to be issues.”
The state’s limitations are exactly why it’s so important for county health departments to invest in data management, said Dr. Philip Huang, Dallas County’s public health director.
“The numbers are so huge, it’s shown how historically there’s been a lack of investment in this infrastructure for all of public health data,” Huang said. “We’re trying to develop our systems, improve our data systems because our data is so important for everything we’re doing.”
Collin County commissioners put CARES Act money toward testing, emergency housing, food and grocery assistance, small-business grants and other projects. Meanwhile, according to Huang, Dallas County devoted some of that money for a staff that does contact tracing and case investigations. Dallas County officials also invested in an upgraded data platform, which took effect in early October, officials said.
“We’re also looking at the hospital data, we’re also looking at other indicators. … But this is one of the pieces that gives us a picture of what the trends are,” Huang said. “Whether it’s safe to open things up, whether we need to be in orange, red, yellow or green ... [These] important decisions are made in part based on this data.”
But some Collin County elected officials — such as Commissioner Darrell Hale, who voted in favor of removing data from the county’s dashboard — say investing in robust case management isn’t worth the money.
“People are going to do what they want to do,” Hale said. “We all know that it’s dangerous to speed and go and drive fast, but people still do it all the time. People make dangerous decisions every day. And I don’t know how much more data we can put out there that tells people that COVID is bad.”
Not a matter of ‘perfect data’
Totals of confirmed cases, COVID-19 deaths, recoveries and active cases are still accessible if county residents click the link for the state’s dashboard. However, the numbers aren’t broken down in any way, and to discern how many new cases were reported each day in Collin County, people must navigate the Department of State Health Services website to a separate webpage.
Some county residents say the way the numbers have been handled reflects elected officials’ overall response to the pandemic.
Some of Collin County’s largest cities — Allen, McKinney and Plano — use state data to update local dashboards. However, Frisco, a city of about 200,000 people, discontinued its cumulative COVID-19 dashboard on Sept. 1.
James Nunn has lived in Frisco for more than 20 years. He said there’s no reason COVID-19 case data shouldn’t be available to Frisco residents at the city or county level.
“It’s OK if there are some discrepancies,” Nunn said. “By choosing to not give information — all of it — for me, what it says is that ‘You’re not smart enough to understand what this is.’ "
Hayley E. Rohn, a McKinney resident, said that losing easy access to the data has been “like removing the weather report because the forecast is bad.”
“It really does help our community make informed decisions,” Rohn said. “We all know the data, like the weather, isn’t 100% accurate or predictable, but it is necessary and helpful to know.”
According to Department of State Health Services numbers, COVID-19 deaths in Collin County residents have reached 345. Over the past few weeks, the state has reported several of the county’s highest single-day new case totals of the entire pandemic.
As he logs the latest trends, Parameswran said he can’t help but wonder how his neighbors might be handling the pandemic differently if his elected officials did the same.
“I think the commissioners and the county judge could have a tremendous influence on the people who are blocking this,” he said. “You would think that public officials would reach them somehow and get the message to them, but they’re not.”
