The CDC said the number was revised March 15 due to a “coding logic error,” according to a footnote on the agency’s COVID Data Tracker. Pediatric death counts were not the only ones to be lowered — total deaths were reduced by roughly 70,000.

“An adjustment was made to COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 involving the removal of 72,277 — including 416 pediatric deaths — deaths previously reported across 26 states because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related,” Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the CDC, told the Washington Examiner. “Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported.”

According to the CDC’s weekly provisional data, only 921 children have died for reasons “involving COVID-19,” an even lower number than the official data tracker now presents. The provisional data reported by the CDC typically lags by some period of time. //

The CDC has encountered other issues with data reporting before. The agency was criticized in February after The New York Times reported that a large portion of the data being collected by the agency regarding COVID-19 was not being made available to the public. Earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that hospitalization data for kids could also be misleading, as many of the children hospitalized with COVID-19 were there for reasons other than the virus.