Oklahoma health officials announced on Wednesday that they're changing the way it reports COVID-19 deaths, in order to present "a more timely picture of the disease's impact in Oklahoma."
The state has been working to narrow a discrepancy between CDC and state data on deaths from COVID. CDC data recently has been reporting about 2,500 more deaths than Oklahoma.
Moving forward, the state will include the Provisional Death Count, based on death certificates, in its daily COVID report. State epidemiologists had been finding large numbers of incomplete records that required further investigation. They claim those investigations caused the state numbers to fall further and further behind CDC numbers.
The current CDC death count for Oklahoma is 7,035, while Oklahoma's death count was most recently 4,534.
In Wednesday's report, there were no additional deaths due to the coronavirus and 747 new infections.
In the past seven days, Oklahoma has reported 4,736 new cases and 270 deaths due to the coronavirus. That's an average of 677 infections per day and 39 deaths per day.
408,963 people — more than 96 percent of the total cases — have since been classified as having recovered from the virus.
There are 12,248 active cases in the state.
