THE ISSUE
“The Pennsylvania Department of Health is dragging its feet on releasing up-to-date, statewide COVID-19 death data by ZIP code despite reaching a court settlement with LNP | LancasterOnline conceding that aggregate data on the deaths falls under the state’s open records law,” LNP | LancasterOnline’s Colin Evans reported in Sunday’s “Lancaster Watchdog” column. “Citing the need for a ‘legal review,’ the department requested a 30-day extension to provide the most recent death figures in response to a Right-to-Know request LNP | LancasterOnline filed Sept. 14. ... The extension notice is the latest delay in a legal saga stretching back to last fall, when the department denied LNP’s request for the COVID-19 death data for ZIP codes in Lancaster County.”
We know that COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 1,700 people in Lancaster County. That’s not a matter of dispute.
People continue to contract COVID-19 and some of those who aren’t vaccinated and boosted continue to die, albeit in numbers that are mercifully lower than during the pandemic’s surges. As Evans reported Sunday, about 60 people here have died of COVID-19 just since March, when Lancaster County took down the dashboard that tracked cases and deaths.
The editorial board cannot speak for LNP | LancasterOnline’s news department, but it seems clear why data on deaths by ZIP code would be illuminating, especially in a county with diverse suburban, urban and rural populations.
What isn’t clear — and what hasn’t been clear throughout the pandemic — is why the Pennsylvania Department of Health has been so stingy in its handling of COVID-19 data.
Lancaster County’s dashboard, which used data from the county coroner’s office, “displayed COVID-19 deaths by municipality based on where people had died,” Evans explained.
“We felt that there was no reason to avoid transparency in providing that information,” said Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni. “I think we’re very open with that information, that data, without compromising privacy of individuals.”
If only the state Health Department took the same approach.
As Evans noted, LNP | LancasterOnline appealed the state Health Department’s denial to the state’s Office of Open Records, which sided with the newspaper and ordered the Health Department to release the data.
The department appealed in Commonwealth Court. “Both sides in the case filed briefs to the court before reaching an agreement just under two weeks ago to provide LNP | LancasterOnline with the data it originally requested,” Evans reported.
But the state only sent data covered by the initial request, made a year ago, covering the pandemic’s start until September 2021. So “a reporter filed a request to the department to provide the data for the entire state’s ZIP codes, and for it to be current as of when the request was filled,” Evans noted.
Then the state asked for an additional 30 days to conduct a legal review of the records.
Terry Mutchler, a public records attorney who served as the first executive director of the state Office of Open Records, described the Health Department’s response as “playing games.”
“Now, clearly, the reporter’s request is for a different time period. But it is for the same data,” Mutchler said. “It’s a different version of holding records hostage.”
For what reason, though?
The state Health Department insists that its intransigence is actually diligence intended to protect the privacy of COVID-19 patients. (Sadly, because Lancaster County lacks a public health department of its own, we have to rely largely on the state for data.)
Health Department officials have contended that COVID-19 death data could be used to identify the people who had died if the figures were provided at a narrower geographic level.
LNP | LancasterOnline countered that because the death counts would be aggregated by ZIP code, that would not be possible.
As Evans reported, in the data finally provided to LNP | LancasterOnline via the settlement, “the state data provides death counts for all county ZIP codes except those where less than five people died of COVID-19, presumably due to the same privacy concerns the department initially cited.”
He noted that the “ZIP code-level data released to the newspaper provides the most granular portrait of which sections of the county lost the most residents to COVID-19 over the first 18 months of the pandemic.”
According to the data, Evans reported, “the ZIP codes encompassing Lancaster city and its northern suburbs — including Manheim Township, Lititz and Ephrata, among others — lost the most residents to COVID-19 in the period covered. ZIP code 17602, which includes some of the city, West Lampeter and East Lampeter townships, lost 161 residents, the most in the county.”
“Adjusted for population, however, the data provides a notably different portrait of resident deaths. While Lancaster city and the northern suburbs still ranked among the county’s hardest-hit areas, two of Lancaster’s rural ZIP codes — 17578, near Denver, which includes Reamstown and Schoeneck, and 17509, which includes Ninepoints — had the most COVID-19 deaths per 1,000 residents in the county.”
So what that might tell us?
Perhaps that residents of these areas were not adequately reached by accurate messaging on COVID-19 prevention. Perhaps that more work needs to be done to connect those residents with essential public health information (a task a county public health department could take on).
We will leave it to genuine public health experts to further analyze the data. But even to us, the value of this granular data seems self-evident.
As we’ve tried to convey to the state Department of Health throughout this pandemic, clear and comprehensive data is essential in countering misinformation and disinformation — both of which have circulated with the virus, with terrible consequences.
An ounce of prevention
President Joe Biden recently claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. We wish this was true, but it’s not.
Americans — including Lancaster County residents — continue to fall ill because of the virus. Thankfully, we now have effective COVID-19 vaccines and boosters and treatments such as Paxlovid.
But data analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in June indicated that 1 in 13 adults in the United States have “long COVID” symptoms, “defined as symptoms lasting three or more months after first contracting the virus.” For too many, long COVID has been debilitating.
So please get vaccinated or, if you have done so already, get boosted with the new bivalent COVID-19 vaccine, which targets the original coronavirus strain and two omicron subvariants.
Talk to your physician about getting a flu shot, too. The bivalent COVID-19 booster and the influenza vaccine can be administered at the same time — just on different arms.
We’re approaching indoors season. Let’s not give COVID-19 and its ever-mutating variants more opportunities to set us back.
