Emphases addded:
Local epidemiologists and researchers say the Hawaii Department of Health has continually rebuffed their requests for data throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and that the department's latest decision to scale back the information it has been releasing to the public daily on COVID-19 deaths is just the latest example of the department's lack of openness.
"All I can tell you is how absolutely frustrated we are," said DeWolfe Miller, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at the University of Hawaii.
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For instance, researchers were hoping to get data on the number of people who were hospitalized with COVID-19 broken down by vaccination status and age, which could help to better calculate the efficacy of the vaccines on different age groups, said Sumner La Croix, a research fellow at the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization and economics professor at UH Manoa. But he said state health officials have declined to provide it.
"What is really clear to me is that DOH doesn't really want any independent investigators actually looking at the data," said La Croix. "They really don't want anyone second guessing their decisions."
Department of Health officials didn't respond to a request for comment about the criticism, which reached a new height this weekend when the department announced that it would no longer be sending out the detailed information it had been providing for months about COVID-related deaths. A department spokesman, in an email to the media on Sunday, cited the "volume of COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 related deaths" as the reason for no longer sending out the information, even though case counts have declined markedly over the past four weeks.
The daily emails included the age range of the person who died, the county where they died, hospitalization status, gender and whether they had underlying conditions.
Hawaii has the lowest COVID-19 infection rate of any state in the nation. It's also a pandemic standout for a more dubious reason: instituting the most extreme restrictions on the public's access to official records.
In March 2020, Hawaii Gov. David Ige issued an emergency proclamation suspending the state's three-decades-old open records law, which aims to protect the public interest by exposing government to scrutiny.
The suspension came just as people were thirsty for information about what the government was doing to respond to the public health crisis, said Brian Black, executive director of the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest.
UPDATE:
For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.
When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.
/misc | Oct 07, 2021