Local man finds state COVID mistake

For some people the numbers don’t just add up and when they don’t make sense, they have to speak out and ask questions. That is what happened with Alex Knepp and the State of Indiana’s COVID website.

Knepp is a self-avowed numbers guy. It helps him both as a banker and as a member of the Barr-Reeve Community School Board. So when he couldn’t make the numbers on the state COVID site add up, he began to ask questions.

“I had been trying to figure it out for quite a while,” said Knepp. “I just noticed the numbers and the calculations on the state map did not match. So, I contacted State Health Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box who then put me in touch with the people who are in charge of putting the numbers together.”

Knepp says he got some initial resistance from the state when he tried to point out their error.

“They told me the numbers have a lot of moving parts,” he said. “Having been an auditor I understood they were trying to tell me it was complicated, but that just made me want to simplify it and leave it to the numbers. I kept pushing back until they would listen. Once they checked my numbers they realized they needed to make an adjustment.”

Knepp says that the problem was located within the positivity rate and it was especially skewing the numbers in rural counties.

“What they were doing was averaging the daily averages instead of working out an average for a week,” said Knepp. “Those numbers got messed up because rural counties often have a small report on weekends that tends to heavy toward positive cases because testing in many rural counties is hard to come by so the people who are checked are often sick.”

He says that situation would lead those counties to have a high percentage of positivity over the weekend. When that average was figured with other averages through the week the numbers would get out of whack. That led to many rural county’s getting the “red” designation from the state board of health when the numbers did not really justify it.

“I was mostly curious with the numbers until Governor Holcomb began to tie activities in a community to the color code,” said Knepp. “That got me more interested and more active.”

Once the state realized the mistake that Knepp found, it began to look for deeply into its numbers and found some additional mistakes that were corrected.

The quick result moved Daviess County out of the “red” and into the “orange” category.

“It was announced the state had identified an error resulting in incorrect positivity rates at both the state and county levels,” reported Daviess County Health Officer Dr. Merle Holsopple in a release Monday. “The error has been rectified. After reviewing the information received on the change in calculations, the Daviess County Health Officer (in conjunction with the County Commissioners) made the decision to change the Daviess County designation from Red to Orange, effective immediately.”

For Knepp the change felt good.

“It kind of restored my hope in government,” said Knepp. “Once they saw the mistake, they fixed it and then went even further and fixed another mistake. I know I was a squeaky wheel for a while, but I just had to dig at it. I know our local health department has been too overloaded to deal with that. It’s been a rough year for them. Now, I hope we are getting more accurate information to the citizens and the health department.”

Even with the changes health officials are reminding the public that Daviess County has still had more than 2,000 cases of COVID this year as well as 63 deaths and that there is more work to do.

“Our staff continue to work diligently to help reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus,” said Dr. Holsopple. “We thank the citizens of Daviess County for their continued cooperation during these difficult times.”