Governor Kate Brown endorsed on Thursday the state’s abrupt decision to stop publishing detailed summaries of all Oregon residents with COVID-19 who died during the pandemic.
The Oregon Health Authority announced the decision at 4 pm on Wednesday, saying the number of new deaths would still be announced daily in summary, with aggregated information on age, sex and county residence available online.
For more than 10 months, the health authority listed information for each Oregonian who died, including the person’s age, county, place of death, date of a positive coronavirus test, date of death and general presence of underlying health conditions.
But state officials say that providing so much detail was too much work, essentially requiring a full-time position. It is not clear whether any other state has provided as much detail as Oregon about individual deaths.
The state’s decision to limit information was immediately criticized by some state legislators.
Senator Michael Dembrow, a Portland Democrat who writes a daily newsletter filled with coronavirus news and analysis, contacted the health authority and asked authorities to reconsider it without success.
“I believe there is real human value in seeing these individuals that we lose every day, even if we don’t know their names, or really a lot about them beyond their age and location,” wrote Dembrow in a Wednesday night message to constituents . “Still, they appear as individuals, as more than a statistic. I appreciate that, especially in the midst of this terrible pandemic, and I know that many of you do too. “
Senate Republicans suggested on Twitter that the decision to reduce the available information “smells like a cover-up here.”
Dru Draper, a caucus spokesman, said on Thursday that the health authority should publish biographical details, as it did during the pandemic.
“It looks like it was working,” he said. “After all, what is the reason for giving people less information? Why are we suddenly changing the way we report deaths? “
Draper noted that deaths have declined since December, so it should take less time for the health authority to compile the details for disclosure. Announcing the change now, he said, seems in line with an effort to limit precise details of fatality on elderly people who, under the direction of the state’s Democratic governor, are after teachers in the vaccination order.
“It looks like this is the only thing that could have changed the calculation,” said Draper.
House Republicans also criticized the move.
“The decision to suspend access to important information questions the governor’s commitment to transparency and accountability at a time when statewide decisions have made Oregon a national outlier by ignoring the CDC guidelines and rejecting an approach based on science for vaccine delivery, ”Republican leader Christine Drazan of Canby said in a statement.
“To maintain trust and preserve transparency, Governor Brown and OHA must reverse yesterday’s decision and commit to providing clear, consistent and timely data across all categories going forward,” she added.
On Thursday, Brown’s office defended the health authority’s decision to stop providing detailed death reports. A spokesman praised the new state data panel, unveiled on Wednesday, as a way of providing more timely information that “will continue to give Oregon residents a complete picture of COVID-19 deaths in the state” without so much hard work for state officials.
“To my knowledge, no state in the country releases as much COVID-19 data to the media and the public as Oregon,” said Charles Boyle in a statement.
On the last day of detailed reports earlier this week, Oregon reported details of 22 deaths, including 17 elderly people. For example, the state’s 1,888th fatality was an 82-year-old man from Douglas County with underlying medical conditions who tested positive on January 14 and died on January 23 at the Mercy Medical Center.
That level of detail is over.
The health official noted on Thursday that of the six new reported deaths, four occurred among people aged 80 and over, one death was an Oregonian aged 70-79 and one was 60-69.
This information was already available online, tracking the cumulative change in deaths by age group.
The state did not announce deaths by gender or municipality. But tracking cumulative changes online, statistics show that three men died and three women died, The Oregonian / OregonLive found. The deaths occurred among residents of Columbia, Deschutes, Douglas, Klamath, Malheur and Multnomah counties.
The end of detailed descriptions of deaths will make it difficult to know precisely how many Oregon seniors test positive for coronavirus and subsequently die during the period when Brown allowed teachers to receive vaccines before the elderly.
The newsroom filed for public registration on Thursday for each of the 20 deaths announced the day before, seeking basic biographical information the state had previously released.
State officials have not yet responded. But the agency previously refused similar requests for information stored in its online public health database, saying that state law makes that data and information exempt from disclosure – unless authorities decide to disclose it.
State officials began to provide detailed information with the first death on March 14. Facing concerns about inadequate transparency in other coronavirus data, Brown said later that month that he instructed the health authority to “share all COVID-19 information with the public that does not compromise patient privacy. “
Here’s the full statement from Brown’s spokesman on Thursday:
“Governor Brown is committed to ensuring that Oregon residents have timely information about COVID-19. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Oregon has established a national standard of transparency by reporting COVID-19 cases and deaths daily. However, in recent weeks, reconciliation of death data has started to significantly delay daily reports – with daily reports sometimes not being issued until late at night – due to the time it takes state epidemiologists to verify the information on each health certificate. death. To ensure that the reports are more timely, the Oregon Health Authority started using a data panel to continue to give Oregon residents a complete picture of COVID-19 deaths in the state. This change will also allow Oregon data to be included in daily national data updates – which has been hampered recently due to the backlog in Oregon data. As far as I know, no state in the country releases as much COVID-19 data to the media and the public as Oregon.
This was an internal reporting decision made by OHA, however, I confirmed that OHA will still be able to include information on COVID-19 deaths, with age groups, in its daily updates. “
– Brad Schmidt; [email protected]; 503-294-7628; @_brad_schmidt