Florida transparency vanishes

It’s another example of how Florida has gone from one of the most transparent states sharing pandemic data to one of the least. For 15 months, from the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the state released detailed data every day, allowing researchers and news organizations to examine trends.

But the state stopped doing so on June 4. Now Florida is the only state in the nation to release COVID-19 data once a week. That report is a document, not a database that can be analyzed. The state also continues to withhold information that was once public, such as vaccinations, infections and fatalities among nonresidents.

“We’ve been fighting about this since the very beginning,” Marsh said.

The state does provide data to the CDC, and its weekly reports show the cases and vaccinations by both county and age group. But researchers can’t access the actual data to perform their own analysis.

Protecting privacy is a legitimate concern, Salemi said. Intersecting too many variables like county, age and vaccination status can raise privacy concerns, he said, “but if we’re looking at this statewide, I don’t see where there could be any problems whatsoever.” To figure out whether breakthrough cases and reinfections are occurring in Florida, Salemi said, outside experts and the public need data stratifying cases by not just vaccination status, but also when people were infected, or vaccinated, or boosted. The lack of public data in the face of the spreading omicron variant makes it harder for local governments and private citizens to make their own safety judgements, he said.

“We were sitting pretty as the delta variant spread, and we’re sitting pretty again,” Salemi said. “We have to make informed decisions now, but we can only do that if we have the information.”

But just as Florida has restricted the public’s access to COVID-19 data, so too has it limited what local officials can do about curbing the spread of the virus. In May, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature restricted the emergency orders local officials issued in 2020 to reduce infections, such as mask and social distancing requirements. In November, state leaders barred school districts from imposing mask mandates and essentially banned public and private employers from requiring that employees get vaccinated.

Data transparency isn’t just a matter of public curiosity, Salemi said. It also helps public health experts fill in knowledge gaps that public agencies are unwilling or unable to fill.

The nearly two-year pandemic continues while the state’s public health agencies are underfunded and understaffed, Salemi said. Florida Department of Health staffing fell by nearly 30 percent in the past 10 years. A Times analysis from the beginning of the pandemic found that the Florida Department of Health had among the fewest employees per resident and lowest average pay in the county.

“There is an overwhelming amount of responsibility on the epidemiologists at the state and county level,” Salemi said. “They are doing exceptional work. But we can be additional boots on the ground if we have access to this kind of data.”