NH DHHS Announces Transition to Weekly COVID-19 Press Releases

Concord, NH – The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has announced that the State will transition to reporting COVID-19 Updates on a weekly basis, effective the week of May 16, 2022. The COVID-19 Weekly Update will be issued each Thursday, with the first COVID-19 Weekly Update issued on Thursday, May 19. The last daily update will be issued on Friday, May 13. The COVID-19 Dashboards will continue to be updated daily, Monday through Friday, providing timely, accurate, and important data surrounding COVID-19 in New Hampshire.

“As COVID-19 will remain present throughout our state, the transition to weekly reporting reflects the transition from pandemic to endemic. It is time to surveil and report on COVID-19 as we do other endemic infectious diseases such as influenza,” said DHHS Commissioner Lori Shibinette. “We will continue to provide meaningful, accurate data on a daily basis through 8 COVID-19 Dashboards. Our data reporting will be focused on the bigger picture of how COVID-19 impacts the health of our communities and our healthcare system.”

The COVID-19 Weekly Update will include the number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths reported to DHHS during the previous week. The State is making several changes to the reporting metrics as part of this transition. DHHS will report only test results reported by healthcare providers. Because the use of COVID-19 home testing continues to increase, DHHS is no longer able to verify the accuracy of case positivity rates, so test positivity rates will no longer be reported. Additionally, demographic and geographical information will not be included in the COVID-19 Weekly Update. This information will be updated Monday through Friday on the COVID-19 Dashboards. 

While the COVID-19 Dashboards will continue to be updated daily, several metrics are being changed to align with the changes related to the transition to weekly reporting. Among the Dashboard changes:

• The Testing Dashboard will now just report on positive test results submitted by healthcare providers through the State’s electronic lab reporting.
• New Cases replaces Active Cases, as the number of Active Cases is no longer an accurate estimate with the prevalence of unreported home test results.
• The 7-Day Moving Average on the Testing Dashboard will be replaced with the more accurate 7-Day New Cases Average.
• Due to the recent change in how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calculates community transmission rates, the community transmission metric on the COVID-19 Maps Dashboard will direct visitors to the community transmission rates published by the CDC.

For more information, please visit the DHHS COVID-19 webpage at www.covid19.nh.gov.