THE STUPID STATES
Where the GOP decides not to report COVID as cases soar
COVID cases spiked again Saturday nationwide but people in some Republican states are in the dark about just how bad things are getting.
That’s because several GOP-led states scaled back their reporting of COVID-19 statistics this month just as cases started to skyrocket.
Florida last month started to issue weekly updates instead of daily tallies on its official COVID dashboard, making it harder for people to get information about the raging spread of the delta variant.
Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota have taken similar steps to cut back on COVID information.
“There was absolutely no reason to eliminate the daily updates beyond an effort to pretend like there are no updates,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from the Orlando area.
The Sunshine State has now become a major epicenter in the coronavirus surge fueled by the delta variant and the refusal of many Americans to get vaccinated.
Infections in Florida now stand at about a weekly average of about 10,000 a day, or about 20% of the nationwide total, which the CDC says is increasing at about 50% a week.
Florida had 14,000 cases on Saturday alone. Nationwide, there were 35,902 new cases reported late Saturday.
Hospitalizations are also rising nationwide as well as deaths, although much slower than caseloads.
The worst-hit states besides Florida are Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, all states where vaccination rates are among the lowest in the nation.
New York State has so far been spared the worst of the surge, largely because it enjoys a higher vaccination rate.
Still, rates are rising quickly in the Empire State with the weekly average hitting about 1,300 cases a day. That’s the most cases since late May and the numbers are soaring by about 60% a week.
The shift to weekly instead of daily reporting in Florida, Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota marks a notable shift as conservatives seek to downplay the pandemic and head off any push for vaccine or mask mandates.
Coronavirus dashboards have become a staple for Americans closely tracking case counts and trends to navigate a crisis that has killed more than 610,000 people in the U.S.
In Nebraska, the state actually stopped reporting on the virus altogether for two weeks after GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts declared an end to the official virus emergency, forcing news reporters to file public records requests or turn to national websites that track state data to learn about COVID statistics.
The state backtracked two weeks later and came up with a bare-bones weekly site that provides some basic numbers.
When Florida changed the frequency of its virus reporting earlier this month, officials said it made sense given the decreasing number of cases and the increasing number of people being vaccinated.
Cases started soaring soon after, and Florida last week made up up one-fifth of the country’s new coronavirus infections. As a result, Florida’s weekly releases — typically done on Friday afternoons — have consequences for the country’s understanding of the current summer surge, with no statewide COVID stats coming out of the virus hotspot for six days a week.
In Florida’s last two weekly reports, the number of new cases shot up from 23,000 to 45,000 and then 73,000 on Friday, an average of more than 10,000 per day. Hospitals are starting to run out of space in parts of the state.
With cases rising, Democrats and other critics have urged state officials and Gov. Ron DeSantis to resume daily outbreak updates.
The trend of reducing data reporting has alarmed infectious disease specialists who believe that more information is better during a pandemic.
“The actions that each of us individually take are all influenced by our perception of what the risk is out there,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Florida health officials note they have not curtailed the sharing of data with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
State officials say maintaining daily updates on the virus does require significant resources for states.
For instance, Kansas, where Gov. Laura Kelly is a Democrat, switched to to reporting virus numbers three times a week in May because the state health department said providing daily statistics consumed too much time for its already overwhelmed staff.
In Nebraska, officials decided that continuing to update the virus dashboard daily wasn’t the best use of state resources now partly because there had been a steady decline in the number of views of the website indicating less interest in the numbers, spokeswoman Olga Dack said. The state could return to providing daily updates if the governor’s office decided that was needed, she said.
“Now that Nebraska is back to normal, some of the staff that has been dedicated to the dashboard has been able to focus on some of the other important issues,” Dack said.