State health agency sued
Dept. accused of withholding detailed COVID-19 info
TALLAHASSEE — A Democratic state lawmaker and an open government group are suing the Florida Department of Health for not providing detailed, daily statistics about Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases in violation of the state’s open-records laws.
Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, of Orlando, and the Florida Center for Government Accountability filed suit late Monday evening in Leon County Circuit Court, alleging the DOH isn’t providing data and reports that should be publicly available.
“The DeSantis administration has consistently refused to release COVID-related public records, which not only hurts our efforts to contain this deadly virus, it is also unlawful,” Smith said Tuesday. “That’s why we’re suing them — to obtain the public records our constituents are entitled to under the Florida Constitution and to force the state to resume daily COVID dashboard reporting and avoid future litigation on this matter.”
Smith filed a request on July 23 for COVID-19 daily case numbers, positivity rates, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccinations for Orange County. A health department spokeswoman responded Aug. 9, citing a state law that exempts information given to the agency for epidemiological research from public records laws.
On Aug. 16, the FLCGA, a Tallahassee-based nonpartisan group, filed a similar request for all 67 counties, but the DOH cited the same statute to deny them. The lawsuit seeks an order from the court for the DOH to revert to its previous practice of publishing the daily data on its dashboard.
“Providing citizens with more information about the rampaging virus is not only consistent with public health, but with the reasons why Floridians overwhelmingly passed open government laws,” said Michael Barfield, FLCGA’s director of public access. “Virus politics should not
dictate what information is made available to citizens so they can then make informed choices about their activities.”
For most of the pandemic, the department posted detailed data showing case numbers, hospitalizations, deaths and other information by county. But that stopped in June when case counts were low and Florida’s positivity rate was less than 5%.
“COVID-19 cases have significantly decreased over the past year as we have a less than 5% positivity rate, and our state is returning to normal, with vaccines widely available throughout Florida,” press secretary Christina Pushaw told the News Service of Florida at the time.
The health department opted to issue weekly reports but noted it still gave daily
numbers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so the data would still be made public. But the CDC reports only show county-level data for the prior week, not on a daily basis.
The latest CDC weekly report for Orange County is a seven-day average for the week ending Aug. 29, showing 9,065 cases, a 16.5% positivity rate, 909 new hospitalizations and no deaths. By comparison, the CDC weekly report includes this information for the counties in South Florida for the seven-day period ending Aug. 30:
Palm Beach County: 8,608 cases, 17.66% positivity rate, 784 new hospitalizations and 0 deaths.
Broward County: 11,655 cases, 17.29% positivity rate, 1,224 new hospitalizations and 0 deaths.
Miami-Dade County: 16,621 cases, 12.32% positivity rate, 1,182 new hospitalizations and 0 deaths.
Smith said he believes the lack of access to daily numbers has real-world consequences, such as when local school boards want to know the number of cases and hospitalizations for children as they decide whether to issue a mask mandate for schools.
A DOH spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit Tuesday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters earlier this month he didn’t see a need to go back to daily reports since the information eventually is published by the CDC.
“Every day the CDC puts out the case numbers, and that’s something that people have had access to the whole time,” DeSantis said. “CDC is doing the same thing that Health [DOH] would do. It’s coming from the state; the state uploads it there.”