Maricopa County, Arizona Negative Cases on March 18

[CSSEGISandData]

On March 18, our data reflected a decrease of 467 cases in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to an announcement posted to the Maricopa County Dashboard, the negative cases were due to:

• A reference laboratory’s electronic reporting system was incorrectly reporting test results for non-Maricopa residents to Maricopa County.
• This has been corrected at the state-level with the laboratory, and those cases that were incorrectly reported to Maricopa County have now been redirected to the appropriate jurisdictions.

We have reached out to the Arizona Department of Health for a potential correction to our dataset. Based on the wording of the announcement, it is possible that these cases were directly allocated throughout the state and as such the state level case behavior was unaffected.