Forthcoming changes to the way we publish Coronavirus information

Published: 11 December 2020

On Friday 11 December there will be planned maintenance of the NHS Welsh Laboratory Information Management System (WLIMS) to allow for essential service upgrades to take place.

This will affect our daily reporting of Coronavirus figures, and therefore there will be no release of daily figures on Sunday 13 December.  There will be a period of data reconciliation and validation that will affect our daily reporting figures for several days after this downtime.

Public Health Wales is also making some changes to the way we publish information on our website and data dashboard.

From Monday 14 December, we will be bringing forward the publication time for our data dashboard and our daily statement from 2pm to the earlier time of 12pm.

For operational reasons, we will be changing the daily ‘data correct as of’ from 1pm the previous day to 9am the previous day.  We also plan to extend the lag period for seven day case rate reporting from two to four days.  This will further improve the accuracy of Coronavirus cases per 100,000 population by local authority area for the most recent 7 day incidence.

Dr Robin Howe, Incident Director for the Coronavirus Response at Public Health Wales, said:

“These changes to publication arrangements are part of our approach to continuing improvement of the accuracy of our dashboard.

“We remind people that our dashboard is intended as a rapid reporting tool to provide the best and most up-to-date information, which is subject to ongoing data reconciliation.  

"Official statistics relating to Coronavirus in Wales are published by the Office for National Statistics."