Officials at the state health department said they are still working to fix technical issues with its COVID public reporting system, but on Tuesday they announced Oklahoma’s total number of cases stands at 27,147.
There were 893 cases were reported Tuesday. State Health Commissioner Lance Frye said the other 821 were in a digital backlog, and some may offset surprisingly low case numbers reported yesterday and Sunday.
"I don’t know when those cases, when they were run, and that doesn’t — and that’s not that those people haven’t been notified of the positive cases. They just haven’t been reported out yet in the system," Frye said.
Frye said the health department’s system has crashed several times in recent days, and they’re trying to use federal coronavirus funding to buy a new one.
"It really was never built to take on a pandemic. And so, we are working with a company to basically to do a kind of patch it until we can get a new system," Frye said.
Tuesday's 893 cases represent the state's fourth-highest increase.
Tulsa County had 219 of those cases, its fourth-highest increase as well. The county leads the state with 6,535 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Oklahoma County is 44 cases behind. Cleveland County has the third-highest total, 1,760.
Nine deaths were reported on Tuesday, the most in nearly four months. One happened in the past 24 hours. Two Tulsa County women 65 or older were among the dead. Seven deaths were adults 65 or older. The other two were a man between 50 and 64 years old and a woman between 36 and 49 years old.
COVID-19 has now killed 461 Oklahomans. Tulsa County has 86 deaths, most in the state.
Recording all 1,714 new and backlogged cases on Tuesday pushes the state's seven-day average of new cases up from 670 to 772, a new high. It is not clear what adjustments state officials will make to their reporting timeline.
According to the Tulsa Health Department's dashboard, Tulsa County's seven-day average rose from 150 to 155 on Tuesday's report of cases. It is not clear whether backlogged cases have been attributed to counties yet.
Statewide, hospitalizations were at 613 as of Monday evening, with 248 in intensive care units. As of 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, the state had not released new hospitalization figures.
The state's record number of hospitalizations on a single day is 638, set July 15.
The state had 20% of its adult ICU beds available as of Monday evening, the last time that was reported. The state has stopped reporting disaggregated hospital bed data.
According to the Tulsa Health Department, local hospitalizations were at 117 at last count. Tulsa County hit a high of 124 hospitalizations on July 13 and 14. Local hospitalization numbers are frequently changed based on new information.
Over the course of the pandemic, 2,429 Oklahomans have been hospitalized because of COVID-19.
The state health department reported on Tuesday 913 additional patients as recovered from COVID-19, raising that total to 20,663. Patients are considered recovered if they did not die, are not currently hospitalized and it has been at least 14 days since their symptoms began. The state has 5,202 active cases.
In Tulsa County, 5,276 patients are now considered to have recovered, leaving the county with 1,172 active cases.
Overall, the state's percentage of positive tests rose from 5.8% at the end of last week to 6% as of Monday evening, the last time that was reported. Nearly 10% of 23,779 tests reported at the end of Monday were positive.
