Dallas County is working with officials from the State of Texas on adding new data to their daily COVID-19 case reports.
The County will publish the number of new probable cases along with the number of confirmed cases.
"We're working with the state and they're planning in the next week or so to start publishing data on probable cases, so we want to give a warning that we are moving toward that also," said Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Dr. Philip Huang.
There's a different standard for determining probable cases than for confirmed cases.
"Confirmed cases are those that are confirmed by the molecular amplification tests like the PCR test," said Dr. Huang. "The probable cases involve either having symptoms and an epidemiological link to someone who's been confirmed, or also the testing with the antibody test or even the antigen test."
County officials hope to start reporting the additional data soon. When they do, it will be broken out into a separate category.
"In all of these that we've been counting confirmed, we eliminate duplicates, so a person is only counted once," said Dr. Huang. "We'll provide separate numbers for the confirmed and probable cases."