Older cases of COVID-19 to be retrospectively uploaded on CIDR between 5-20 May
From Thursday 5 May 2022, a process to retrospectively upload cases of COVID-19 diagnosed by several private laboratories between the end of November 2021 and the end of January 2022 on the Computerised Infectious Diseases reporting system (CIDR) will commence. The process will take two weeks and approximately 28,000 cases will be processed.
As these cases will be retrospectively assigned to the date they were first diagnosed there will be no effect on the number of confirmed daily cases reported for the preceding day or the number of weekly cases reported during this process. However, the cumulative total number of cases since the start of the pandemic as reported on HPSC’s Epidemiology of COVID-19 in Ireland Data Hub, will increase in excess of the number of cases notified the preceding day as it will now include these older cases.
The delay in uploading these cases on CIDR arose due to the volume of cases diagnosed by private laboratories, operating outside of the HSE testing service, between November 2021 and January 2022. Unlike the laboratories operating under the HSE COVID-19 Test and Trace service, these laboratories are not connected to CIDR, and could not electronically notify cases on CIDR. Previously, cases diagnosed in these private laboratories were manually uploaded on CIDR by staff in Departments of Public Health. Manual uploading became unfeasible given the increased number of cases for that period. An automated process to upload these cases on CIDR has now been developed.
The absence of these cases on CIDR did not affect the epidemiological assessment of COVID-19 at the time or the public health management of cases. Positive SARS-CoV-2 results were uploaded to the HSE COVID Care Tracker (HSE CCT) and cases were followed up by the HSE Contact Management Programme when they were diagnosed. In addition, between 22 December 2021 and 14 February 2022, the daily COVID-19 case number reported publicly was an estimate based on positive SARS-CoV-2 tests uploaded to the HSE CCT the preceding day, and therefore included these cases.
HPSC will issue further communication when the process is complete.