Replace misleading numeric values in covid_hosp_facility?

[nmdefries]

covid_hosp_facility total_adult_patients_hospitalized_confirmed_covid_7_day_avg contains lots of -999999, but also has NAs. The -999999 could easily lead to errors in analyses. Should we change these to NA before adding them to our system? Or do we want to re-report as-is?

[melange396]

theres presumably some significance to the distinction between that value and a null. perhaps we should contact the dataset curators for clarification to help us decide.

[brookslogan]

From docs:

Suppression is applied to the file for sums and averages less than four (4). In these cases, the field will be replaced with “-999,999”.

But I have also seen 0s in the data. So maybe --- for the sum I was looking at --- this is just for [1..3], or maybe it's inconsistently for [1..3] or [0..3] depending on facility/time/mood/etc. For other sums or other averages, I don't know if it's consistent.