COLUMBUS, Ohio — Leadership at the Ohio Department of Health's Bureau of Infectious Diseases has been "restructured" after the department announced Wednesday it discovered approximately 4,000 COVID-19 deaths had gone unreported, Ohio's Health Director Stephanie McCloud said Thursday.
The department has started an "administrative review" investigating why the issue was not detected sooner, and McCloud said she has overseen a restructuring of leadership at the bureau.
The Ohio Department of Health has "added additional resources" to address the matter quickly. The state understands it needs to restore public confidence in its COVID-19 numbers, McCloud said.
"I'm quite confident of the new processes we have in place, and the new eyes on this," she said. "This will look much different, better, and accurate going forward."
The problem dates to October, the department said. That month, the state encountered "process issues affecting the reconciliation and reporting" of the deaths, according to the Ohio Department of Health's statement Wednesday.
McCloud said Thursday she has been skeptical of the death numbers. She said she raised concerns.
"That number didn't seem correct with me. I've had concerns about it. So, I was, in fact, the first one to push back, but we are working with staff," McCloud said. "There was a miss there that created these numbers."
Ohio gets deaths reports from two inputs — the state's death certificate database and a federal database — which must be reconciled, and the 4,000 deaths went unreported because that process was not done in a timely manner, she said.
"The largest number of deaths were from November and December. Although being reported this week, the deaths will reflect the appropriate date of death on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard," the department's statement said. "The issue related to the unreconciled COVID-19 deaths was identified by the Ohio Department of Health during a routine employee training."
The director pledged Ohio would have more quality assurance in its reporting going forward.
Health departments, including Ohio's, were unprepared for the demands of the pandemic, lacking robust systems to report data in real time, McCloud said. She said Ohio is not the only state to announce unreported deaths as a result, citing issues in Indiana in February, Washington in December, and Texas in July. Ohio's underreporting — an increase by about 34% to the state's total death count — is larger in scale than the issues reported in those three states.