So that's why I have a lot of caution and a lot of concern.īAUER: Statewide, the current COVID surge in Nebraska has risen as high as it was last fall, just before it reached its peak.
PETERSON: It would be helpful if the governor were to not have stalled the reporting statewide because we would then be able to capture that information for those people coming in. But as the delta variant has caused a new wave, he's largely blind to trends across the state. He checks COVID trends regularly through the county health department website and what's in the local newspaper. He's a supervisor for the food and beverage department at an arena in the capital city, Lincoln, a job that puts him in contact with people from all across the state. LUCAS PETERSON: In the beginning of the pandemic, I was calling my doctor pretty much every day at that point.īAUER: Peterson is immunocompromised. That doesn't violate anyone's confidentiality.īAUER: And people in Nebraska want to know the numbers, people like Lucas Peterson. TOM FRIEDEN: For example, you wouldn't want to say, we have this-many cases of this age, race, ethnicity and gender. Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Obama, says it's possible to release detailed numbers without violating privacy and privacy laws. TOM SAFRANEK: I've never seen anyone dictate that data like this should not be disclosed.īAUER: He says he never got a complaint about data he released violating HIPAA or harming an individual in three decades as Nebraska's epidemiologist and that failing to report important data now is, quote, "public health malpractice." Dr. RICKETTS: We have HIPAA laws that we have to follow and concerns about privacy is one of the reasons why we can't break down that granular data.īAUER: But Nebraska's former state epidemiologist, Dr. PETE RICKETTS: We have no announcement with regard to the dashboard at this time.īAUER: One reason Ricketts shut down the dashboard when case numbers dropped is because Nebraska counties have fewer than 20,000 residents, and he said publishing county-level COVID data could violate state and federal health privacy laws. Now they're 15 times higher than when the dashboard went away. A month later, though, case counts were rising sharply again. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths were at all-time lows, and Ricketts said the staff publishing the COVID data were needed elsewhere. But at the end of June, Republican Governor Pete Ricketts shut the dashboard down.
WILL BAUER, BYLINE: For more than a year, Nebraska's COVID dashboard displayed loads of information, including new case numbers for every county in the state. Will Bauer of Nebraska Public Media reports. Seemed like the pandemic was almost over, didn't it? Now with numbers surging again, some states are still not updating their COVID data, and public health experts say that's a problem.
Many states have online dashboards to report COVID-19 numbers, but some took them down or stopped updating them frequently when case numbers dropped sharply last winter.
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