Ohio & New York: Missing and Misleading Data

A look at recent news about how Ohio "found" 4,000 COVID-19 deaths, and New York kept 7,000 nursing home deaths from the public.

Ohio and New York came under heavy fire within last week for their less-than-transparent reporting on COVID-19 deaths.

Ohio mysteriously “found” about 4,000 COVID-19 deaths it had failed to report, some dating back as far as October 2020.Ohio chalked it up to a “reconciliation issue” between two database systems it used to track Coronavirus deaths.

Here’s what the Ohio Department of Health said about it:

“The Ohio Department of Health (ODH) announced today that as many as 4,000 COVID-19 deaths may have been underreported through the state’s reporting system. These deaths will be added to the state’s death count during the coming week.

Process issues affecting the reconciliation and reporting of these deaths began in October. The largest number of deaths were from November and December. Although being reported this week, the deaths will reflect the appropriate date of death on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard.

ODH will continue working with the Auditor of State’s office, which has been engage…