Test counts inflated, death tolls deflated, metrics shifted.
Federal and state officials across the country have altered or hidden public health data crucial to tracking the coronavirus’ spread, hindering the ability to detect a surge of infections as President Donald Trump pushes the nation to reopen rapidly.
In at least a dozen states, health departments have inflated testing numbers or deflated death tallies by changing criteria for who counts as a coronavirus victim and what counts as a coronavirus test, according to reporting from POLITICO, other news outlets and the states’ own admissions. Some states have shifted the metrics for a “safe” reopening; Arizona sought to clamp down on bad news at one point by simply shuttering its pandemic modeling. About a third of the states aren’t even reporting hospital admission data — a big red flag for the resurgence of the virus.
The spotty data flow is particularly worrisome to public health officials trying to help Americans make decisions about safely venturing out. The lack of accurate and consistent Covid-19 data, coupled with the fact that the White House no longer has regular briefings where officials reinforce the need for ongoing social distancing, makes that task even harder.
New examples seem to sprout up daily. The District of Columbia this week became the latest jurisdiction to endure scrutiny, with the city using a “community spread” metric — excluding nursing homes, correctional facilities and others — as a justification for reopening the area.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds told reporters that the state will share information about outbreaks at meatpacking plants only upon request. And Georgia has only just begun to differentiate between the two types of coronavirus tests it’s been adding into its testing totals for weeks.
“All these stories about undercounts, overcounts, miscounts, are undermining our ability to deal with the pandemic,” said Irwin Redlener, a public health expert at Columbia University. The country, he said, is confronting an “unheard of level of chaos in the data, the protocols, the information.”
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At least a half-dozen states have admitted to inflating their testing figures by mixing two different types of tests into its totals, a practice widely derided as scientifically unsound.
In Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp has been among the strongest proponents of reopening, the inclusion of antibody tests inflated the state’s overall testing count by nearly 78,000 — a disclosure that came a few weeks after officials posted a chart of new confirmed cases in Georgia with the dates jumbled out of order, showing a downward trajectory.
Like several other states, Georgia’s health department began listing separate totals for its antibody and diagnostic test counts only after reporters discovered it had been quietly combining the two.
Georgia’s count of hospitalized coronavirus patients also includes only those who were already in the hospital when their diagnosis was reported to the state, a limitation that the state has openly admitted likely creates “an underestimation of actual hospitalizations.”
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Florida has weathered a string of controversies over its evidence to support GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’ boasts that the state is faring better than most, including an attempt to block access to information on nursing home deaths and the firing of a health department official who now alleges she was pushed out for refusing to manipulate the state’s data.
A separate dispute involved the health department’s attempt to suppress the coronavirus death count published by Florida’s medical examiners — a figure that was initially higher than health officials’ tally.
“Never, before today, has the Department of Health raised an eyebrow that this information is confidential and privileged,” said Stephen Nelson, the district medical examiner for Polk County, Fla.
By the time the examiners’ death toll was finally released almost two weeks later amid public pressure, the number was lower than the one published by the health department.
States led by Democratic governors haven’t been immune from transparency questions either. New Jersey revised down its coronavirus death count by nearly 1,000 after concluding it would only count those with a lab-confirmed diagnosis of the disease, a move a GOP state legislator called a “whitewash.”
And Illinois briefly drew fire after it limited its public reporting on nursing home cases and deaths to only those with “active” outbreaks — a decision that the state quickly reversed.
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- Discussion
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In at least a dozen states, health departments have inflated testing numbers or deflated death tallies by changing criteria for who counts as a coronavirus victim and what counts as a coronavirus testhttps://t.co/WIhQqOmr71
— POLITICO (@politico) May 28, 2020
And it works the other way too. For example, not long ago, Pennsylvania was caught including in its death count cases where COVID 19 had not been confirmed, just suspected. High or low, I don’t believe these numbers are anywhere near accurate.
But but but China LIED to its people about Coronavirus.
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