We get information about tests and test results from multiple sources: labs, medical providers, testing centers and hospitals. We also get them from multiple sources: electronic databases, emails, phone calls and faxes. These also come to different places: the respective health department offices and the joint department operations center themselves.

We sort all of this information and send to the operations team a list of who’s newly diagnosed. The operations team then investigates and sends us back the results. From this, we determine who has symptoms, when they started, and how they got COVID. The operations team also collects information about hospitalized patients daily, and we track who is in the hospital, who is in the ICU, and when they were discharged. The operations staff also identify those who were recovered.

From this, we then report data on the dashboard every weekday, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays. Weekend data are updated on the dashboard the following Monday.

We only report COVID cases in Sutter and Yuba County residents. We only report the hospitalizations for Sutter and Yuba County residents. We only report Sutter and Yuba County residents who died. We only report Sutter and Yuba County residents who recover.

We only report PCR tests, the nasal swabs. Why?

A PCR test is diagnostic. It gives us a time frame to work from. Between that and your symptoms, if you have them, we can identify when you might have been exposed, who might have been exposed by you, and how long you need to be in isolation.

Antibody tests don’t allow us to diagnose disease. All they do is tell us that you might have been exposed. They don’t tell us when. Antibody tests are also a lot more variable in how good they are than PCR tests, especially when only a small proportion of the community have had COVID.

Now that may change as we go forward, better tests are developed and we get a better understanding of how COVID works. But, right now, PCR tests are the gold standard for who has COVID, and so that’s what we report on the dashboard.

A false positive means the lab test says you have the disease when you don’t.

A false negative means the lab test says you do not have the disease when you do.

We get that question a lot. People assume that the hospital is trying to "increase" COVID-19 hospitalized numbers. That's not true.

Even if you do not have the typical symptoms of difficulty breathing, coughing, and shortness of breath, if you test positive for COVID-19 and present to the hospital you are contagious and can put at risk the doctors and nurses working to care for you. Knowing whether you are infected with COVID-19 or not allows the doctors and nurses to immediately wear the necessary personal protective equipment (PPEs) so that you don't infect them. Remember, these are front-line medical workers, who day in and day out are risking their lives to interact with the infectious and the ill. Please provide them with the respect that is their due.

Plus, COVID-19 isn't a disease that only harms the lungs. It can stress out your entire body, leading to generalized inflammation. Inflammation leads to lots of other severe, harmful damage including strokes, heart attacks, kidney damage, and liver damage. COVID-19 can damage essentially every part of your body so just because you don't have a cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, you can still have COVID-19 and be infectious.

Different dashboards collect and report information about COVID in different ways, and over different time frames.

In California, information about COVID begins at the local health department, what we call the local health jurisdiction. Usually, that’s the county where the patient lives. That health department gets the lab report, does the investigation, and controls the spread. We’re the tip of the spear, and that means we have the most up-to-date data. We’re also the closest to it.

Counties then report to the State through the State’s disease reporting system. The CA dashboard is usually reporting the same data a few days after we do. Part of that is time for us to investigate and clear things up, and part are the inevitable delays that come from 61 different jurisdictions reporting individually and the state analyzing it.

State data is then reported to the CDC. That also takes time. Now, some of the national dashboards, like Johns Hopkins, draw directly from county dashboards, so they’re only a day behind us usually.

Different dashboards also count data differently. For example, our dashboard reports based on what county you live in. If you’re hospitalized on the moon, we count you. The state dashboard counts hospital patients based on the county the hospital is in. So our dashboard shows X for Sutter, since they’re our residents, and the state dashboard shows 0, since they’re not hospitalized in Sutter County.

Generally, patients are considered recovered ten days after they develop symptoms, assuming they are getting better. Obviously, patients who are hospitalized are going to take longer than that. We generally try to check in with patients before we report them as recovered, to make sure they are actually getting better. That can add a couple days if they’re not checking in or not doing better.

We’re also working through our old records, in case we have some patients who recovered but may not have been reported. We’ll update our numbers as we identify those.

Generally, no. People who test positive for COVID often get multiple tests. Those tests are all part of the same disease incident, and so we only report them once.

Now, sometimes we do get duplicate reports, such as people with different spellings of their name, or different addresses. We work very hard to identify and remove those duplicates. But, as a rule, we only report one instance of COVID once.

Mortality rates have a very specific meaning – it’s deaths from a given cause from the population. What people mean when they say mortality rate is actually case fatality rate: how many people who get COVID will die? That rate is calculated by dividing the number of COVID-19 deaths by the number of COVID-19 cases, but that’s very difficult to calculate right now. It’s easy to identify how many people have died of COVID, but we don’t really know how many people have had it.

Locally, we have had 19 deaths and 2,916 cases as of Thursday, Oct. 1. That’s a case fatality rate of nearly 0.7% (.65%), or about seven times deadlier than the flu.

No. The state looks at factors like a county helping those in need when examining the watch list, and they do not penalize us for being a good neighbor.

The key number is less than 7 new cases per 100,000 people per day over 14 days, and have a test positivity of less than 8%.

What does that mean? For Sutter County, that’s easy. We have a little more than 100,000 people in Sutter County, so we need to get down to less than 7 new cases per day for two weeks.

Yuba County is a bit smaller, with around 77,000 people, so the math is a bit more complicated. It’s closer to less than 6 new cases per day over a two-week period.

Yes. We see that a lot. We will get the initial lab report, and note they don’t have symptoms. And then we will interview them, and they’ll say they have symptoms, or their symptoms began after they got tested. Then we move them to the symptomatic column.

That’s a major reason why the symptomatic and asymptomatic numbers change rather frequently. We learn more from talking to people with COVID, and update the data.

By far, most COVID transmission is called “contact with a known case.” That means we’re able to link them to someone else they were around prior to getting sick.

The most common example is the people you live with. It makes sense. We don’t wear masks at home. We don’t social distance at home. We cook for each other, we eat together, we watch television together, we talk to each other. We spend a lot of time with the people we live with, closer together than six feet. That’s the most common source of COVID transmission. It’s also the hardest to stop, since many people can’t isolate themselves easily, and the people we live with can be exposed days before we get symptoms and thus learn we’re sick. That’s why protecting yourself against COVID when outside the home is so important.

Other common sources are small parties and get togethers. Unfortunately, we saw a spike in cases after holidays like Memorial Day and Fourth of July. Again, a party is normally great fun, but it’s dangerous right now. Lots of people, close together, for long periods of time.

We also see a lot of COVID transmission in the workplace. Again, it makes sense. We’re around the same people, in close proximity, day after day. Again, it’s why COVID protections are so important, and why so many businesses are now doing COVID symptom checks. It’s also why it is very important to stay home from work if you have COVID symptoms.

Yes. COVID is sneaky like that. People with no symptoms can spread COVID-- nearly 20 percent of cases are asymptomatic. People can also spread COVID before they get symptoms. That is why facial coverings are so important – you may not know you have COVID.