This change in reporting on Collin County’s dashboard comes as a result of the state taking over COVID-19 case management, County Administrator Bill Bilyeu said to commissioners at a June 15 meeting.
The county had been reporting the number of hospitalized Collin County residents due to the coronavirus. Hospitalization reporting will soon reflect the state’s data instead, Bilyeu said.
“The state number and how they track hospitalizations is different from how we did,” he said. “Theirs is more accurate. It’s hospital capacity, which is really what the question is.”
The state’s dashboard details lab-confirmed COVID-19 patients currently in Texas hospitals, total staffed hospital beds, available hospital beds, available intensive care unit beds and available ventilators, according to the state’s website.
These numbers are also broken down by the trauma service area. Collin County falls into Trauma Service Area E, per the site.
Collin County can no longer obtain individualized records of who is hospitalized, Bilyeu said.
“The way the data is reported doesn’t detail it down to that information,” he said.
The change in reporting will be more accurate than the hospitalization data the county previously gathered, Bilyeu said.
“We feel like the hospital numbers, even on our end, may not have been accurate because they were based on people self-reporting,” he said. “We had a good number of people we had no contact with.”
