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Reporting Delays Show June Was Considerably Worse For Nashville Than First Thought

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Nashville announced the city’s worst day of the pandemic yet Thursday — with 688 new cases of the coronavirus in 24 hours.

But, 172 of those cases were delayed results from late June.

This is the fourth time Nashville has seen a swell from a backlog, which led to falsely low numbers while the city was in Phase 3 of reopening. But, even with at least 600 cases missing from June’s numbers at the time, the climb in cases was still significant enough to roll back to a revised Phase 2.

The health department is now working with a new lab, Nashville-based PathGroup, and says it expects to “eliminate or significantly reduce future reporting delays.”

It’s worth noting that even with the delayed results removed from Thursday’s new cases, the total would have been 516. That’s still significantly higher than the current average of 360 new cases daily per day and would have been the second-worst day of the pandemic.

Rachel Iacovone, Director of Multiplatform Publishing

Rachel Iacovone (YAH-kuh-VOAN-ee) is WPLN's Director of Multiplatform Publishing, which is a long way of saying she leads all the ways the news reaches you (this website, social media, This Is Nashville and more). She began her public radio career covering politics in Florida during the 2016 presidential race. In 2019, Rachel came to Nashville as a local Morning Edition, and later All Things Considered, host before her passion for data deep dives, visualizations, photography and social media storytelling pulled her off air and put her online fully.

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