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It has been more than a month since Hawaii's first coronavirus case, and the state Department of Health still cannot seem to get their act together with regard to the release of information. Thread:
When the DOH released today's COVID-19 case information shortly before noon, they listed the number of Hawaii deaths at 5 — but included a footnote saying that a 6th death had been reported on Maui. It's not clear why the death was not just recorded in today's data. See below.
At some point after today's information was released, the state removed it from their website entirely — the asterisk, the footnote, everything. See below.
When asked about the reason, a spokesperson for the Department of Health declined to give a reason and instead wrote: "Please standby for the press conference at 2:30 p.m. for more information on that."
It's far from the only case of information discrepancy. Today's report from the state (see the graphics above) list 18 confirmed cases on Kauai, but the Kauai County-managed COVID-19 page lists 19 cases, with 0 new (meaning it's been 19 since at least yesterday).
Earlier this week, we got an email from the DOH asking that we correct a story with a 'misleading headline' that suggested the state was encouraging testing for people without coronavirus symptoms. Excerpt from that email in my next tweet:
"DOH has been clearly saying (like all other states and CDC) that only symptomatic persons should be tested. We’d appreciate a correction." The problem with this is that the DIRECTOR OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH said the opposite — that's how we got the information.
During a telebriefing, a state official asked the following question from Hawaii News Now to Dr. Bruce Anderson. Remember that we can only submit questions by text message during these briefings.
Question: "You told us yesterday that the testing protocols may be modified to test more people who have been in close contact with positive cases – even without symptoms present. When will that happen?" Answer follows in my next tweet.
Dr. Anderson: "We’ve begun to do that already. The Health Department has been focused on the contacts that are symptomatic, but ... we've begun to look at those who are close contacts, even though they have not expressed symptoms."
There's so much else to stress about right now — it doesn't make sense to me that more than a month into this pandemic the people in charge of disseminating critical information can't seem to figure it out.
