Puerto Rico's coronavirus crisis is generating some good news for the wrong reasons.
On Wednesday, the Health Department confirmed that it has just 915 positive cases of the novel virus _ not the more than 1,300 cases it had previously reported.
The adjustment comes as health officials, under pressure from Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism, recently admitted that they had been double- and triple-counting some cases.
At the root of the problem is that patients who received positive results using less-reliable rapid tests were having their diagnosis confirmed through slower molecular tests, and were being counted twice in government data.
The faulty information _ along with the overall low number of tests performed � has cast a pall over government claims that it's controlling the outbreak and might consider reopening some parts of the economy.
After confirming its first case on March 13, the Health Department said the island had surpassed 1,000 cases on April 16.
Faced with the dirty data, health officials recently began sharing their information with Puerto Rico's Statistic Institute.
The director of that agency, Orville Disdier, told Radio Isla that there were deficiencies and issues with about one-third of the tests, only some of which can be corrected. In some cases, the patients' ages, genders and addresses were missing, and there's no way to recover that information, he said.
Even so, the Health Department on Wednesday said it registered 80 new cases and three deaths since Tuesday's report _ for a total of 67 fatalities. The U.S. territory of 3.2 million people has run a total of 12,174 tests, of which 1,378 have come back positive (including the duplicate tests), 8,842 were negative, 10 were inconclusive and 1,944 are pending.
Health Secretary Lorenzo Gonzalez said the numbers are subject to change as researchers continue to "clean up" the data.
"The data remains dynamic as we analyze it day by day," he said in a statement. "Simultaneously, we are evaluating the processes and our reports to detect any changes that we need to make. Our commitment is to handle the information responsibly with the goal of providing a frame of reference regarding the impact of COVID-19 in our population."
Puerto Rico has taken some of the most decisive measures of any U.S. jurisdiction to try to stop the spread of the virus. The island has been on lockdown _ with all nonessential businesses closed and a curfew in place _ since March 16. Those measures are slated to run through May 3, even as Gonzalez has said that he would recommend social distancing measures remain in effect through June.
Also on Wednesday, Puerto Rico's legislature will continue holding hearings to determine if there was any undue influence _ or outright corruption _ in the government's attempts to order $38 million worth of rapid tests from a construction company called Apex. The order was ultimately canceled and Apex returned the funds, but the scandal is threatening Gov. Wanda Vazquez's reelection campaign as she faces a primary challenge from within her New Progressive Party.
