COLUMBUS – The DeWine administration is doing damage control as officials with two state agencies reported problems with their systems this week.
Ohio’s Health Department says it’s restructuring its infectious disease division following the discovery of as many as 4,000 unreported COVID-19 deaths and will investigate how the error happened.
The state Department of Job and Family Services, meanwhile, attributed an explosion of weekly first-time unemployment claims to widespread fraud.
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Stephanie McCloud, director of the health agency says the department has begun a standard review to determine how the erroneous reporting of deaths happened and why it wasn’t discovered earlier.
“I’m quite confident of the new process we have in pace and the new eyes on this and certainly this will look much different, better and accurate going forward,” she said during Gov. Mike DeWine’s regular Thursday afternoon coronavirus briefing.
The Health Department says that adding the deaths will inflate daily reported death counts for two or three days, but the appropriate date of deaths will be reflected in the state’s tally of 11,856 deaths from the coronavirus during the coming week.
Of the 721 newly reported deaths on Thursday, the health department says 650 were due to the reconciliation.
“Process issues affecting the reconciliation and reporting of these deaths” began in October, with most occurring in November and December,” department spokeswoman Melanie Amato said in a release Wednesday.
The office of state Auditor Keith Faber says the discovery came when the health department was reconciling an internal death certificate database with a database maintained by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A spokesman says the auditor’s office did not have access to the CDC database because of federal privacy laws and so wasn’t aware of the discrepancy.
The department identified the problem during a routine employee training, Amato said.
The department says it will continue working with the auditor of state’s office, which has been doing an audit of COVID-19 data since September.
The Department of Job and Family Services says a nearly 200% increase in first-time unemployment claims last week is suspected to be the result of fraud DeWine attributed to “international gangsters.”
All of the 140,444 claims will be reviewed, which will create delays in processing some legitimate claims, department officials said.
“Many of the claims of the 140,000 that were filed that are legitimate will be processed and paid. Many more will be delayed though, until they’re properly qualified to make sure we don’t send out money that shouldn’t be sent out,” said Lt. Gov Jon Husted, who has been overseeing problems with the state’s unemployment system during the pandemic.
The new unemployment claims filed between Jan. 31 and Feb. 6 represent an increase of 194% from the prior week.
So far, 44,000 claims have been flagged under suspicion of fraud and are under review and the agency expects to uncover additional fraudulent claims, according to a release from the department.