The N.L. government has been downplaying COVID-19 deaths for months

On the afternoon of March 29, using what it calls the COVID-19 information dashboard, Newfoundland and Labrador's Public Health division proclaimed no one had died from COVID-19 in the most recent reporting period.

The update came as a large zero, prominently displayed under the heading "New Deaths" on one side of the dashboard.

Anyone who wanted to know the total death count could add up the numbers in the graphs on the other side of the screen — breakdowns of deaths by age and region — and come to a total of 339.

But that number was six people more — not zero — than the dashboard had totalled the day before.

Public Health had quietly changed the numbers. But in order to figure that out, anyone adding up the totals would need to have tallied the numbers from before the change — and kept them, because the old numbers were no longer available online.

CBC News has been keeping track of that, and other, COVID-19 information since the pandemic began in March 2020, and found the government has been downplaying the number of coronavirus deaths for months. 

How does the total number of deaths go up when there were no new deaths reported? The answer lies in a change the provincial government quietly made to its coronavirus updates at the beginning of 2023.

In March 2022, the Health Department unveiled its online COVID-19 dashboard, which was to be the public's sole source of pandemic data. Among other data, the dashboard announced the number of people in hospital, including the number of people in critical care, and the number of deaths since the previous update.

The dashboard was updated Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until mid-May, when the government reduced the frequency of updates to weekly, and toward the end of last year, the department said the province's COVID-19 situation was stable enough to reduce update frequency to every two weeks.

The first update of 2023 — on Jan. 4, covering the final two weeks of 2022 — also revealed an unannounced change in how Public Health was reporting numbers.

Instead of an up-to-the-day picture of the province's current pandemic situation, the data was now a summary of a two-week reporting period.

The 35 hospitalizations noted on the dashboard didn't mean there were 35 people in hospital as of the update — as previously would have been the case — but that a total of 35 people had been admitted to hospital over the course of two weeks, from Dec. 18-31. (The number of current hospitalizations would be lower than 35, with many of those people likely having since recovered and being discharged, as well as a handful of them possibly not recovering at all.)

On Jan. 4, the province's total deaths stood at 295. The dashboard doesn't include an overall total but does provide the number of deaths recorded in each regional health authority, as well as a breakdown by age range. Adding up either of the breakdowns will provide the total number of deaths.

With the next update, a discrepancy began to emerge. On Jan. 18, the dashboard announced two new deaths, but adding up the age and regional breakdowns revealed the number of total deaths had gone up by four. Two weeks later, the dashboard announced seven new deaths, but the total had gone up by eight.