Pennsylvania vaccination doses overcounted by 500,000 injections, state says

About 500,000 fewer coronavirus vaccines were given in Pennsylvania than the Department of Health previously reported, the state said, in part because the state was unable to properly track people who were vaccinated in two different places.

This means that the number of people who have started the vaccination process has decreased by more than half a million, while the actual number of people who have been fully vaccinated has increased slightly.

In addition to the tracking issue, the department on Monday accused the duplicate records of inflating the number of partially vaccinated people. Almost 11.3 million doses were administered in the state instead of 11.8 million.

The new data came a week after The Inquirer reported that one million partially vaccinated Pennsylvanians missed their second injection, according to data on file with the CDC. At the time, the Health Department was not tracking this data, but said it was working to link the first and second doses to the residents who received them.

Now the Ministry of Health says it has completed this work. The health ministry did not say whether the data change was an effort to find figures it did not have available 10 days ago, but a spokesperson said on Monday that the data “now reflects specifically the number of people who received the first of a two-dose vaccine.

The number of people who need a second injection is now lower and the number of people fully vaccinated has increased by 64,000.

The data review was included in a Friday night press release without an explanation of how the deviation occurred or how it was detected. The state generally collects immunization data from vaccine suppliers, who are required to report it to the state database.

The discovery of the discrepancy was made by Department of Health staff who worked on verifying and cleaning the state’s data, spokesman Mark O’Neill said on Monday.

Duplicate vaccinations were recorded for a variety of reasons: software used by some providers that did not register patients using unique identification numbers, people receiving their first and second doses at different locations, and some providers downloading duplicates when reporting data to the state, he said.

The correction was a one-time data reconciliation, and duplicates will no longer be included in Pennsylvania’s daily figures in the future, O’Neill said. The Department of Health reported the change to the CDC, although the federal agency’s data release did not immediately reflect the state’s correction.

State Representative Tim O’Neal (R., Wash.), A member of the state’s COVID-19 task force, said it was good news the Department of Health was able to audit vaccination data, a task of a team of 30 worked and found that more people were fully vaccinated.

“They recognized a few months ago that … it was pretty obvious that we had this problem,” O’Neal said. “Now that the immunization effort … has slowed to some extent, the opportunity to go back and check that data to make sure it’s as accurate as possible has really arisen.”

He said state software was unable to identify someone who received their first and second dose from different providers as the same person, so it would register the patient as two different people.

READ MORE: How many people in Pennsylvania have been vaccinated and still received COVID-19? The state does not matter.

Data reconciliation has been common throughout the pandemic, including with the number of cases and deaths. In June, for example, the CDC found, after a system upgrade, that the number of vaccinations was higher than previously reported in a handful of states and 20,000 lower than reported in New Jersey. And Monday, the governor of Utah said one reporting error meant the condition hadn’t actually reached 70% of adults with at least one dose, tweeting, “Welp. We fucked up.

Data retention during the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a challenge for health services; Pennsylvania health officials have said they are working with an aging technology system and hope to modernize the department’s data systems in the next fiscal year.

READ MORE: Vaccines will remain essential to guard against the delta variant

In addition to not tracking detailed information about residents who missed their second injection – the state was working with the CDC to link data and resolve tracking issues, spokespersons said last week – Pennsylvania does Nor does it track all new infections among vaccinated residents, unlike some other states.

State data does not include vaccinations given to Philadelphia, which runs its vaccination campaign independently. The data review also updated the demographic information of the vaccinees. The health service statement and data dashboard did not provide updated numbers of first, single, and second doses administered.

Although the state figures do not include any data for Philadelphia, the city data uses certain figures reported by the state, Department of Health spokesman James Garrow said, which means the City numbers could drop slightly due to new data from the state.

City employees automatically and manually check Philadelphia’s immunization data for duplicates as part of an established process, Garrow said, so that health officials are confident their data is correct and does not contain large-scale duplication like the state database.

This story will be updated.

Writer Jason Laughlin and graphic designer Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.