EVANSVILLE — Having ceded control of all local COVID-19 data to the Indiana State Department of Health back in July, the Vanderburgh County Health Department no longer offers its own dashboard of local data.
The loss of control of its own data is one of the setbacks Vanderburgh and other counties have suffered in the fight against COVID-19.
The now-defunct local dashboard included information uncovered in the course of the agency's local investigations. Information such as the percentage of COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, the number of patients who had been medically cleared, the number of active cases with ongoing investigations.
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Now, Vanderburgh County Health Department Administrator Joe Gries has to look to ISDH for data. Gries was looking at a report compiled by ISDH — at the local health department's request, he said — of regional data from the 12-county "District 10."
District 10 comprises the southwestern quadrant of Indiana stretching from Crawford County in the east to Posey County in the west. Vanderburgh and Warrick counties are its most populous counties.
"The state, right now this is how they would provide it to us," Gries said. "We’re working to try to figure out how we can maybe get into this (state) database a little bit better and glean some more information. It's just not real user-friendly, and our access isn’t where we can kind of aggregate the data. But we constantly try to look at the information, and we’re trying to pull more and more."
You can still get much Vanderburgh County-specific data on ISDH's statewide dashboard of cases, but other information — such as hospitalizations, ICU bed and ventilator usage — is offered for "District 10." Ascension St. Vincent and Deaconess Health System are the largest hospital systems in District 10, so there's that.
An ISDH hospital directory available online at in.gov/isdh/reports/QAMIS/hosdir/index.htm lets you hover over any county and obtain a list of hospital facilities there.
When it voted to recommend tough new restrictions on bars, restaurants and public gatherings, the Vanderburgh County Health Board had to rely heavily on data gleaned from the ISDH "District 10" report chronicling the coronavirus spread there.
Flipping through that report, Gries was startled to see that information culled from more than 3,900 contact tracing interviews named "retail stores" as the place most often visited by COVID-19 patients 14 days prior to the onset of symptoms or collection of positive specimens. In fact, "retail stores" led by a wide margin — 1,424 to 483 for restaurants, which came in second.
Did this mean residents of District 10 are most likely to acquire COVID-19 at retail stores? No.
"We asked that question," Gries said. "It was like, ‘Wow, this sounds like a lot of people are getting it from retail.’ ‘No, no, no (ISDH said), that’s not what it means.’ Because I can see where a lot of people would find that alarming. You know, ‘I’m not going to go to the grocery store. I’m not going to go shopping at the mall.’"
It was just a list of the places where COVID-19 patients said they had been. If one patient cited 12 different places — "house parties," "worship" and "bars" are among the other categories — he would be counted in each of those designations.
ISDH spokespersons don't answer questions by phone, and they didn't respond to questions the Courier & Press sent by email — but Gries relayed what the state agency told him.
It's not a list of where people acquired COVID-19; it's a list of where they were. And it's limited.
"That doesn’t necessarily mean that I was not wearing my mask. It doesn’t mean that I was in a crowd, that I couldn’t social distance," Gries said. "They’re just identifying where these people were once they were identified as a confirmed case."
Gries said you have to go to the end of the report, where ISDH gives examples of specific events — such as at a funeral in Evansville where 26 people were infected — to find data that's helpful in understanding where cases are being transmitted.
Eleven cases stemmed from a series of seven volleyball games in Evansville between Sept. 8 and Sept. 16. Two football games in Poseyville last month generated eight positive cases, and an Evansville bowling league left behind 13 cases.
Fifteen cases surfaced after a 150-to-200-person wedding ceremony on Sept. 19.
"We can honestly probably say that within that wedding event, there was somebody there who was contagious and spread it to other people," Gries said.
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