The number of active COVID-19 cases in Hamilton County dropped significantly on Thursday. County Health Department officials said the decline was due to three factors:
The Health Department is seeing a downward trend in new positive cases reported daily in Hamilton County.
The Health Department changed the automatic roll-off of “active” status from 21 days to 14 days earlier this month to align with Tennessee Department of Health and CDC guidance.
On September 24, 2020, the Health Department applied a “data clean-up” because some recovered/inactive cases had not rolled off automatically as they were supposed to.
Cases were manually removed that were no longer active. Moving forward, this should not be a problem with cases not rolling off timely.
Active cases are the number of cases still in their infectious period. Typically, this is 10 days, but it can be longer. The Health Department uses a 14-day period to account for some of these variables. An estimate of active cases can be the cumulative number of cases for the past ten days. The exact number that is reported will reflect variables such as how early in their infectious period cases were reported and cases with prolonged infectious periods.