County to release more data as recent virus deaths rise

In an interview conducted Monday by Hamilton County Communication Director Tammy Sander, Chris Walker of the county’s health department said, “Earlier in the week we had some days with 9, 10, 12 new cases. Then towards the end of the week we jumped back up into the low to mid-twenties. A lot of that came from new data coming in, new testing being done, and labs getting caught up on reporting to the state. We may not get back to 9 to 10 new cases a day, but we should begin to see a taper off from that 20 to 25 and start working our way back down shortly.”

Graphic provided by Indiana State Department of Health

Last week, health department officials began releasing additional data on county-wide COVID-19 deaths and cases.

The initial release provided insight into COVID-19 deaths in the county sorted by zip code.

Then, on Friday, the health department released demographics of COVID-19 cases by gender and age.

Sander asked Walker why his department can now release new demographics on county-wide COVID-19 cases as compared to the past. Walker said, “We talked about before the need for HIPAA privacy, the protection of a person’s protected health information, so now that we have a certain number of cases and we’ve exceeded a certain number of deaths, we thought it was prudent that we could safely put out that information without potentially singling out an individual or group of individuals that may expose that protected health information.”

Walker continued, saying, “Our goal is to update the information daily. When we get the data in, it is possible that it is incomplete, there might be some errors in the initial data, and depending on our workload it depends on how quickly we can get that sorted out and pushed back out to the public. Our goal is to push it out as much as we can.”

There has been no additional information released by county officials since late last week.