PUBLIC Health Wales has made some changes to the way they publish information – starting this weekend.

From today, Saturday, April 17, PHW will no longer be publishing coronavirus data or a daily statement on their website on Saturdays. 

Dr Giri Shankar, Incident Director for Public Health Wales, said: “One of the statutory responsibilities for Public Health Wales is to provide timely and accurate information relating to communicable diseases.

“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic we have been attempting to do that in a fair, transparent and accurate manner. This has resulted in a large number of outputs that you will all be familiar with, including our daily dashboard summaries.

“Now we are at a stage in the pandemic response where the case rates have come down and therefore we are needing to review our outputs. So, starting from April 17, we will be moving to six day reporting instead of seven-day reporting.

“We will not be publishing our daily dashboard figures or our updates on a Saturday, however when we do publish our reports on Sunday that will include the results and the data for the period of Saturday as well.

“We are doing this because case numbers are now low therefore any fluctuation day-to-day can give rise to potentially misleading interpretation and we want to be focusing more on the underlying trends rather than the day-to-day fluctuations.

“This can be especially pronounced where there are small numbers in local authority areas which have small population levels and can give rise to false alarms.”

Dr Shankar adds that PHW have now, in this particular phase of the pandemic, been focusing on “other aspects of our surveillance” including tracking variants of concern and vaccination uptake.

He continues: “Therefore we feel that in the next phase of the pandemic our surveillance output will need to be tailored accordingly.

“If things go in the wrong direction and we find ourselves in a situation where case numbers are going up, we will return to seven-day reporting as necessary.”