COLUMBUS – A state health department official says an outdated reporting system led to the undercount of more than 4,200 COVID-19 deaths in Ohio and will now be retired.
The Ohio Department of Health will retire the manual system that has provided a real-time death toll from the pandemic after a breakdown in the system last month led to a massive adjustment in the death count.
The department has switched to exclusively relying on a slower but more reliable and accurate system to count virus-related deaths.
“The Ohio Department of Health is committed to sharing information as quickly as possible but not at the price of accuracy. That is why, as we move forward, we will be reporting the ‘gold standard’ of data from EDRS. The mortality data will be more accurate,” explained chief medical officer Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff said.
The effect was noticeable right away as the death toll on Tuesday afternoon was smaller than the day before by nearly 600. There were 16,750 total COVID-19 deaths in Ohio reported Tuesday, compared to 17,346 on Monday.
The state will begin using death certificate data from the Electronic Death Registration System as the sole source of information for deaths reported on the state’s website, and is retiring the Ohio Disease Reporting System, which records data during the course of a person’s illness and is dependent on updates from data providers.
Relying on data from the EDRS will allow the Department of Health to report only deaths that have been verified to be caused by COVID-19, agency officials said.
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The Biden administration’s plan to funnel more coronavirus aid into states with greater unemployment has irked governors with lower jobless rates, even though many have economies that weren’t hit as hard by the pandemic.
That would include Ohio, which reported a 5.5% unemployment rate in December, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said.
The $1.9 trillion relief bill working its way through Congress allocates extra money to larger, mostly Democratic-run states with higher unemployment rates while rural Midwestern and Southern states that tend to have Republican governors and better jobless numbers, like Ohio, would benefit less.
“It really punishes states who’ve been trying to do this right, the states that have tried to find a balance between protecting the health of its people from the pandemic and also protecting people’s economic health,” Husted said.
Husted says, under a plan bases solely on population, Ohio would receive the seventh-highest amount of aid but is ranked 21st under the proposed Biden administration plan. He says that will cost the state about $800 million.
The White House is defending its distribution plan. It says the plan targets money to areas where it will have the biggest impact.
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Currently, 1.7 million Ohioans have received the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine and 938,600, or about 8% of the state’s total population, has received both shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine begin to be administered in Ohio Tuesday.
President Joe Biden says the U.S. expects to take delivery of enough coronavirus vaccine for all adults — two months earlier than anticipated. He also says that drugmaker Merck will help produce rival Johnson & Johnson’s newly approved one-shot vaccine.
Ohio reported 1,709 newly diagnosed cases of COVID-19 Tuesday for a total of 970,583 cases since the pandemic began one year ago this week.
There were 121 new hospital admissions, raising the total number of hospitalizations to 50,503. There were 1,131 patients in hospitals Tuesday, occupying 4.1% of the state’s available beds.
The seven-day positivity rate has fallen to 3.4% and the 39,940 active cases statewide are the lowest number since late October.