A technical glitch with the Arkansas Department of Health's covid-19 dashboard meant that the state's daily covid numbers were not available Saturday night, a department spokesperson said.
Workers encountered issues while updating the dashboard Saturday and were working on a fix, but it would be late Saturday or early today before the numbers were available, said Danyelle McNeill, public information coordinator for the department.
Department officials should already have Saturday's data, which includes new virus cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccinations reported to the department from across the state Friday, but the software issue kept it from being distributed, McNeill said.
"I don't know how to get them without the dashboard," McNeill said of the day's numbers.
McNeill could not point to a specific instance of a technical issue delaying the dashboard update during the pandemic but said she assumed it had happened before.
The delay came as the number of new covid cases in the state was on the rise. On Friday, the department reported 1,062 new cases, marking the second day in a row where an increase of more than 1,000 cases was reported.
Since March, the number of new virus cases in the state has only hit 1,000 or more on three days: Thursday, Friday and June 16.