PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — The Virginia Department of Health’s website incorrectly listed on Friday that a child had died of COVID-19 in the commonwealth, the second time VDH has made this mistake.

That would have been Virginia’s first child to die of COVID-19 complications.

As of 3 p.m. Friday, VDH’s website still erroneously showed that a person under 9 years old had died, under the demographics tab in the “Virginia COVID-19 Dashboard.”

Larry Hill, the spokesperson for VDH’s Eastern Region, confirmed with 10 On Your Side that the issue was again due to data entry. A search of the data shows that the death was reported in the Chesterfield Health District.

The first error was made back on May 8, when VDH reported a child death in Fairfax County. In that case the person entering the data marked it as a death when it should have been in the column showing the number of cases, a VDH spokesperson said.

Hill said Friday that human error likely caused the issue again. Data is typically inputted manually by epidemiologists across the state. The website’s daily numbers reported are from data entered by 5 p.m. the day before, VDH says.

VDH also announced Friday that a lag in data entry led to more than 2,000 new cases being reported, which would have been a single-day high in cases for the state. The issue, which has come up before, was blamed on a technical error.

“Today’s data will indicate 2,015 new cases,” VDH’s website read Friday. “This figure includes information that should have been reported on Wednesday and Thursday of this week as well as the regular numbers for Friday.”

Latest Posts: