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The Ohio Dept. of Health is accused of engaging in a bizarre cover-up, fighting to keep the locations of nursing home Covid deaths a secret from local media, attorneys and the public.
In an I-Team investigation by WCPO Cincinnati, the local news organization attempted to look into over 8,000 deaths that occurred in long-term facilities in Ohio since the start of the pandemic.
Ohio state bureaucracies, meanwhile, claim the data is private, and they’ve waged a costly legal battle reaching upwards of $45,000 determined to keep those stats in the dark.
More on the story from WCPO:
More than 8,000 people have died of COVID-19 in long-term care facilities in Ohio since the pandemic began.
But where they died is still a secret in the state of Ohio.
After fighting the Ohio Department of Health for more than a year in court, WCPO and several others are now taking their cases to the 10th District Court of Appeals in Columbus.
“They’re just asking for the reliable, true statistics of the pandemic and the deaths that it has caused, or hasn’t caused. It’s that simple,” said Cincinnati attorney Matt Miller-Novak.
WCPO attorney Darren Ford says the state has no right to keep the data from the public.
“These are the people’s records. They are not ODH’s records. They belong to every citizen in the state of Ohio,” Ford said.
The question remains: why is the Ohio state government hiding the death statistics?
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