Oregon Notes

When Oregon reports no data, several days of data, or unusual data (such as decreases in values that should increase), our volunteers note it here on the date the anomaly occurred. We also note here changes in our own methodology that affect the data.

As of January 13, 2021, Oregon’s data is on a 1 day lag in our timeseries due to consistently updating after 7:30 pm Eastern Time, when we publish our daily update.

On February 8, 2021, we cleared the history of our confirmed and probable cases fields in Oregon. Before Oregon switched to reporting tests in units of specimens, we had used its figures for people testing positive to represent confirmed cases and subtracted that number from total cases to get probable cases. However, it turned out that Oregon's people tested figure included people testing positive with antigen, so the positive people tested figure did not accurately reflect confirmed cases.

On January 29, 2021, Oregon announced that their COVID-19 case database would be down “for server and file migration maintenance” on January 30, 2021, and as a result there would be no update to their data on January 31, 2021. Because Oregon’s data is on a one day lag in our timeseries due to late updates, we were unable to update their data on February 1, 2021.

As of December 9, 2020, Oregon’s total test results are drawn from our totalTestsViral field instead of calculated via positive+negative. This change will cause Oregon’s totalTestResults to begin on March 29, 2020 instead of March 4, 2020. Because Oregon’s totalTestsViral represent only electronic laboratory reporting, whereas its cases and negatives represented tests from all sources, this change causes a decrease of 10,296 tests in totalTestResults on March 29. The old numbers remain available by summing the positive and negative fields of our API.

In addition, Oregon has not reported their total tests in people units since December 2, 2020 and they indicated that they will not continue to report total tests in people, so we have removed any values in Total PCR tests (people) we previously carried over.

On December 3, 2020, Oregon removed its total people tested metric, after adding total specimens on December 1. Because they did not provide a full timeseries of specimens, as of December 4, we switched our totalTestResults from people to specimens on December 2, 2020, and stopped calculating Negative (people or cases). This causes an artificial increase of totalTestResults by 960,248 on that day.

On December 1, 2020, Negative (people or cases) decreased by 3,258 from 968,686 to 965,428. Oregon did not post an explanation. Since totalTestResults are computed positive+negative in the state, this caused totalTestResults to drop by 2,035.

On November 5, 2020 we began reporting current hospitalizations from Oregon's COVID-19 Update Dashboard. Previously we had been capturing these metrics on the Oregon Health Authority page.

On November 4, 2020, Oregon stopped reporting current hospitalization data on the Oregon Health Authority page, and so we did not update Oregon's current hospitalization data. Current hospitalization data is provided on Oregon's data dashboard, but it lags a day behind the other source. We will evaluate this change and resume reporting Oregon hospital data when we are sure we can preserve the time series.

On October 9, 2020, Oregon [announced}(https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ERD/Pages/OHA-changes-recovered-cases-reporting.aspx) they were removing the Recovered metric from their reporting and working on a revised definition of recovered. Due to this we cannot continue reporting Recovered, however the time series for the metric is available in the historical data, and our data downloads.

As of June 6, 2020, Oregon only releases updated data for Cases (confirmed plus probable), Deaths (confirmed and probable), and Negative PCR tests (people) metrics on the weekend.