For the second straight week, state health officials listed a Colorado university as the source of a sizable coronavirus outbreak, and for the second straight week, the school says there is no such outbreak.

But state health officials said there was community transmission within the college and that reporting only on separate, smaller outbreaks didn’t capture that spread.

The University of Denver is listed on the state Department of Public Health and Environment’s website as the site of a 217-person outbreak. The dataset, which is updated weekly, says the outbreak was identified Tuesday.

But the university said in a statement “the state’s data will aggregate all separate cases into one outbreak per campus” and that the 217 figure is a total number of cases attached to DU since school began on Aug. 17.

“Currently, only connected cases of two or more are reported as ‘outbreaks’ (versus all cases); however, that also results in a high number of separate ‘outbreaks,’ even when each is as few as 2 cases,” the university’s COVID coordinator, Sarah Watamura, said in a statement.

“Neither system is perfect. On a campus of our size and across months, the cases in a single outbreak will largely not be connected to each other or resulting from transmission on campus, and most cases that are aggregated across time will be resolved.”

In a separate statement, the state health department said that there was “evidence of disease transmission among the DU community.” The agency said that aggregating the tests “allows for more efficiency in case investigation and reporting but does not affect any other public health actions to contain the outbreak.”

“Denver Public Health & Environment’s investigation confirmed that there was transmission among this community not associated with a specific facility/facilities,” an agency spokeswoman said in a statement. “The 16 previously reported outbreaks only capture approximately 37% of the total number of cases associated with the university community. Reporting only clusters at specific facilities did not adequately represent the transmission within the community.”

According to DU’s website, 43 students and three staff members over the past week have COVID, out of nearly 1,900 samples collected and processed.

The site also lists “connected cases.” The last one identified is from Sept. 22 and involved seven students. That cluster is still listed as active and occurred off campus.

Last week, the state’s outbreak data identified an outbreak of 375 at Colorado State University, which, the state said, had also been identified in the days before the data was published.

But the school said it didn’t have an outbreak that large and never had. Like DU, CSU officials said the state’s new method of calculating outbreaks had led to confusion. 

A message sent to the state health department was not immediately returned Thursday.

CSU said last week it would be working with health officials to clarify the data.

As of Wednesday, the outbreak information provided by the state still lists a 375-person situation at CSU.

A messages sent to a college spokeswoman was not immediately returned Thursday.