Geary County Emergency Management Director Garry Berges has issued a statement on the discrepancy between COVID-19 numbers reported by County officials and those reported by the Kansas Department of Health & Environment.
"For the past several weeks, there has been a large discrepancy between the COVID-19 numbers that Geary County Health Department and KDHE were reporting. As of Wednesday, the Health Department reported 104 cases while the KDHE website was showing 160.
Today, conversation was held with the KDHE Bureau of Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics. As we have stated in the past, the Health Department is only reporting those cases that reside in Geary County in the area that they have responsibility for. That includes those who reside in Rural Geary county, and the cities of Junction City, Grandview Plaza, and Milford. Those numbers are verified in the KDHE EPI- tracking system.
If a person tests positive and resides outside of the area that the Health Department has responsibility for, but still resides inside the boundaries of Geary County, they are reported as a Geary County number on the KDHE website.
We will continue to report the numbers on the Geary County website and Facebook pages as we have in the past, counting only the numbers that Geary County authorities have responsibility for. The State will continue reporting the total numbers on their website."
JC Post contacted Fort Riley for information related to this story. The Garrison Public Affairs Office released a statement.
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DOD guidance instructs base commanders to continue to work with local community health officials to share information on base community cases. This is not an option. We are required to share this information. What has changed
is how we share the information. The U.S. Army still has an operational mission and must be prepared to counter threats. So for operational security reasons, we will not publicly announce service member statistics via media
release nor social media. However, Fort Riley still
reports COVID-19 cases in accordance with state law and directly coordinates with state and county public health officials. Local public health reports include these numbers.
Geary County Health Department officials were contacted with Deputy Health Officer Charles Martinez saying they are counting cases that tested positive. "The State shows those that test positive and they use something called a presumptive positive. It's anyone who lived with the people that tested positive. Fort Riley, they're sharing as much information as they can and they've been working with us this whole time."
Martinez added the Health Department is receiving information on Soldiers off-post from the Army but it's unclear if information is being received from cases on the installation itself.