KFL&A Public Health to change the way it reports COVID-19 cases on social media
Global News
Many Kingston-area Twitter users were upset by the announcement of a change in the way KFL&A Public Health will report its COVID-19 numbers.
KFL&A Public Health says it will no longer be posting daily detailed COVID-19 updates to social media starting Thursday, much to the chagrin of many of the health unit’s Twitter followers.
Over the last year, the health unit has routinely tweeted out new cases, along with detailed information about those cases, such as age, gender and mode of transmission.
On Tuesday, the health unit said it would no longer be offering that service, and asked that those interested in daily case counts refer to its COVID-19 dashboard, or the province’s daily case information.
Following some backlash, Dr. Hugh Guan, the outgoing acting medical officer of health, said the health unit may still post case counts to Twitter, but those tweets will lack the detail currently included in the updates.
“We continue to update the dashboard daily and we’ll continue to see what we can do on the Twittersphere. It might be more of a simplified information. But we are just streamlining information there. So it’s not completely stopping reporting. We’re just changing the format a little bit,” Guan said.
The health unit’s official Twitter account noted that the change was being made partly because the COVID-19 pandemic is now being transitioned to an endemic.
A pandemic is an outbreak of disease that affects the whole world, while an endemic refers to a disease or virus regularly found among a group of people, such as the flu.
Guan says the move away from reporting on Twitter, when there is already reporting on the local and provincial dashboard, will streamline the process and avoid duplication of information. Those who want to access the information will be able to do so on the proper channels, while taking some of the attention away from the virus on people’s daily social feeds.
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