Attorney General Todd Rokita is revisiting the debate over the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which states have used to make decisions like lockdowns, mask mandates and school closures. They have published reports that question the data.
republican, Late last week, he, who is running for re-election this fall, released a data analysis by his office highlighting the imperfections in COVID-19 data. The report concludes that Gov. Eric Holcomb’s administration exaggerated the death toll and infection rate of the virus to justify government restrictions that negatively impacted the economy and education system.
Public health experts disagree on the report’s findings, but one political scientist sees it as an attempt by Rokita to position himself as an anti-establishment candidate for re-election.
“Normally, if you’re an incumbent, you would think someone like Rokita would be a shoe-in,” said Laura Merrifield Wilson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis. “But he’s more controversial, so there’s definitely a Republican candidate.”
Refocusing on COVID-19 could be a winning challenge for Rokita, she said. Even though Indiana was one of the first states to lift restrictions in 2020, many Republican voters didn’t like Holcomb’s handling of the pandemic.
Quarantine requirements, business restrictions and school closures were controversial early in the pandemic, as some called for stricter rules to protect the most vulnerable. Some wanted to prioritize personal freedom to keep their businesses open and avoid masks.
The discussion extended to disagreements over the number of deaths and infection rates caused by the coronavirus.
While others share Rokita’s concerns about this data, many studies and health officials say the concern should shift: The number of deaths from COVID-19 is being underestimated. It warns that this is a possibility. Many on both sides of the debate accused government officials of allowing millions of deaths across the country to prop up the economy.
The confusion stems from the reality that data is often incomplete, said Brian Edward Dixon, director of the Regenstrief Institute for Public Health Informatics and professor at the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health.
“When you’re looking at a disease like influenza or COVID-19 on a weekly or monthly basis, what you really want to see is trends in the data, right?” Dixon said. “So when making decisions at the policy level, we often care more about trends than exact numbers.”
The report also claims that deaths from car accidents, drownings and other traumatic events were misclassified as being caused by COVID-19, and deaths contributed by other health issues also inflated the death toll. He added that he is doing so.
Dixon said some deaths may have been misclassified by coroners or doctors, but this is a very rare occurrence and does not significantly skew the data. And it’s common for people to die from multiple health problems, he added. COVID-19 can worsen chronic health problems such as heart disease, leading to potentially fatal complications.
Rokita also criticized the calculation of the COVID-19 positivity rate, which measures what proportion of the total number of tests are positive. He said it was likely that people were counted multiple times for a single infection. Dixon said that early in the pandemic, health care workers may have incorrectly counted one infection as two because they did not understand how long the virus stays in a person’s body. . However, this problem was quickly corrected as doctors better understood the duration of COVID-19.
Health experts have also criticized public health officials for underestimating the number of infections because some people who have become ill have not been tested.
Efforts to improve COVID-19 tracking have resulted in tools such as wastewater sampling to detect COVID-19 levels in communities rather than selective testing.
Experts say data sets need to be read together to get a more accurate picture of the impact of COVID-19.
Binghui Huang can be reached at 317-385-1595 and Bhuang@gannett.com.
