State says it doesn’t have data on health workers’ deaths; ex-data guru says that’s false
One of the tragic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the toll exacted on front-line healthcare workers. Dozens of doctors, nurses and others who work punishing hours to save the lives of COVID-19 patients have lost their own lives.
People like Jackson Memorial Hospital radiology technician Devin Francis, who was engaged to be married in a couple of months, and William Vincent Murdock, an MRI technologist at University of Miami Health System, and Araceli Buendia Ilagan, a nurse for 33 years at Jackson.
The Florida Department of Health maintains a tally of fallen healthcare workers, according to the woman who used to run the state’s COVID-19 dash
The Florida Department of Health told the Miami Herald it doesn’t keep data on COVID-19 deaths among healthcare workers. But the person who maintained Florida’s data dashboard said that’s not true.
board and had access to all of the numbers.
But the Health Department claims it doesn’t.
It has refused to fulfill a public-records request from the Miami Herald, insisting the record does not exist.
Under the state’s publicrecords statute, FSS 119, Florida records are considered public — and must be turned over — unless the state can cite a specific exemption under the law.
“After a thorough search there are no records responsive to your request for the case line data for Florida healthcare workers who have died of COVID-19,” an email signed “DOH Communications” says.
“The Department does not maintain that specific record. The Department is required to provide the public access to inspect and copy the agency’s existing public records pursuant to Section 119.07, Florida Statues [sic],” the email goes on. “However, the Department is not required to create records to fulfill a specific request. Instead, the Department provides
Rebekah Jones access to existing records, in the format in which they are maintained by the agency.”
But Rebekah Jones, the former government employee, says that’s not true.
“DOH keeps detailed data about every COVID-19 victim, including occupation and profession, and any insinuation they don’t is a bold-faced lie,” said Jones, who was fired in May for speaking out against the department. At the time, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ spokeswoman said Jones was ousted for insubordination — just days after going public with concerns about the DOH’s commitment to “accessibility and transparency.”
“On the day I left DOH, we had occupation data for 1,744 COVID-19 victims. Only 2% of the data for occupation was listed as ‘unknown,’ ” she told the Herald.
As of mid-May, state records maintained by the DOH and obtained by the Herald through unofficial channels indicated 25 healthcare workers had died of the virus through one tally and 64 through another.
The first number comes from a data set in which a box is marked “yes” if the person who died was a healthcare worker. The second number comes from a different DOH data set in which data on the deceased is broken down by industry/occupation.
The only COVID-19 data on healthcare workers that the DOH has released to date is the number of long-term-carefacility workers who have died from the virus, and it’s up to more than 40. But that spreadsheet does not account for nurses, doctors or other healthcare workers whose jobs aren’t in longterm care.
Two weeks ago, the Herald asked the DOH for updated data on healthcare workers. The latest statistics the newspaper had — from the middle of May — were outdated.
After receiving the denial from the DOH on Tuesday, a reporter emailed back that the Herald knew the data existed. DOH spokesperson Alberto Moscoso responded that a healthcare worker metric “has not been a part of the line list on the dashboards [sic] data portal” and that the DOH had “not produced a report that states if cases were a healthcare worker.”
The Herald did not ask about the DOH’s data portal or any reports that have been produced. It simply asked for the raw data.
“It may be literally right that they haven’t run a report. But if they have a database from which you could extract it, they could provide you with the database,” said Frank LoMonte, the director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida.
A Miami Herald reporter then followed up with Moscoso to further explain the data it is looking for but did not hear back.
While it is correct that the DOH does not have to create a record in response to a public-records request, it shouldn’t matter in this case if the information already exists, LoMonte said.
“I think it’s extremely important for the public to know. For example, if you have a high death rate in a particular hospital, it’s something that the public needs to be aware of,” said Jude Derisme, vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199, which represents medical workers across Florida.
“This lack of transparency is troubling. DOH is supposed to give us the confidence that our state government’s role in this moment is to inform the public on what to do to help fight this virus. Hiding information from the public does not instill confidence.”
Some other states — such as California, which is also experiencing a massive surge of coronavirus cases — have been reporting COVID-19 data on healthcare workers to the public. It has reported 121 COVID-19 deaths among healthcare personnel.
But others, such as Texas, aren’t making the data public, according to Zenei Cortez, president of National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in the country with nearly 155,000 members.
“They don’t want to take the blame for the number of deaths because they have failed the workers,” she said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is keeping a tally of COVID-19 cases and deaths of healthcare workers and providing the information to the public via its website. As of July 30, nearly 600 workers had died of COVID-19 nationwide, though the agency acknowledges it is likely an undercount.
Cortez estimates the actual number of healthcare workers who have died from COVID-19 is closer to 1,300 at minimum.
This incident isn’t the first time the Herald has experienced difficulty in obtaining coronavirus data from the state.
For more than a month, the Herald called on Gov. Ron DeSantis, the DOH and the Agency for Health Care Administration to release data on residents of long-term-care facilities.
Eventually, the Herald, joined by other media outlets, filed a lawsuit in Leon County Circuit Court asking a judge to order DeSantis to turn over the information. The data was finally made available at the end of April and showed alarming numbers of elders testing positive for COVID-19.