When the Miami Herald sought information from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office last month about COVID-19 deaths in the epicenter of Florida’s coronavirus outbreak, attorneys for the state health department moved to block the records from becoming public.

Emails and phone conference appointments obtained through a public records request show that, while medical examiners across Florida had already released details about deaths in their counties, attorneys for the state spent more than a week trying to convince their counterparts in Miami-Dade County not to provide that information to the Herald.

“As we discussed, it is the Department of Health’s position that the information requested in the request below should not be released as it is confidential and exempt from public record disclosure,” Christine Lamia, deputy general counsel for the health department, wrote on April 2 to Assistant Miami-Dade County Attorney Christopher Angell.

The Miami Herald, which intends to use the information to inform its reporting, obtained the information Thursday after the county bucked Florida’s Department of Health. But the episode is an example of how the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis often has been unwilling or unable to provide crucial information about its coronavirus response — and at times has actively tried to shield critical details about the depths of the crisis from becoming public.

“We must have accurate information to make decisions, to care for loved ones, and to get to the other side of this COVID-19 crisis with any trust in government,” First Amendment Foundation President Pamela Marsh wrote in a critical Op-Ed that ran Wednesday in the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

In recent weeks, Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration has refused to name the nursing homes experiencing coronavirus outbreaks, even as the number of cases in longterm care facilities has passed 1,300. The Department of Corrections had until Wednesday declined to acknowledge two inmate COVID-19 deaths at a privately run prison. And the Department of Health has been unwilling to disclose the extent of an undefined backlog of unresolved coronavirus tests at private labs.

In some cases, the lack of detail has appeared unintentional: DeSantis said Wednesday that he, himself, had been unable to get information about how many people have received unemployment checks from the Department of Economic Opportunity. By Thursday, DeSantis put the number of claims paid at around 33,000, with the state reporting a backlog of more than 800,000.

But the state’s secrecy has led to increasing criticism from Democrats and transparency advocates, who say DeSantis is keeping critical information under wraps at a time when people need to know more about what’s happening in order to make informed decisions about their lives and livelihoods.

“Openness, helpfulness, honesty: that’s what we want from our government in a crisis,” Marsh said Thursday in an interview.

DeSantis has pushed back against criticisms of the state’s transparency. This week, following a Miami Herald article that noted the state has remained silent about the extent of a backlog of pending results from private labs in data released twice daily to the public, DeSantis said Florida is arguably providing more information than any other state.

“Generally, Florida’s data and website, there’s more data put out on a daily basis by Florida’s Department of Health than anywhere,” DeSantis said during a Monday press conference.

In some cases, the state provides information down to granular levels, such as emergency room admissions for cough-related symptoms and the demographics of the state’s 23,000 cases. On the state’s interactive dashboard, people can find out how many people in their county have been admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 and how many confirmed cases exist in their ZIP code, although the latter is of questionable accuracy.

But since the state’s first confirmed coronavirus case, officials have kept some basic information confidential. Most notable: DeSantis has chosen not to reveal the names of nursing homes experiencing outbreaks — cases that, according to Florida Department of Health data, have resulted in at least 126 deaths.

“It’s starting to become pretty well documented that we have a transparency problem with our nursing home industry,” said incoming Florida Senate Democratic leader Gary Farmer.

During a conference call with Florida Democrats, Bill Sauers, president of the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, told reporters Thursday that the refusal to release information about nursing homes leaves families unable to trust that their loved ones are safe inside assisted living facilities. “All this secrecy and stuff that the governor is trying to pull off here, it doesn’t lend itself to being a trusting system,” Sauers said.

This week, DeSantis said “strike teams” of National Guardsmen would begin testings at dozens of nursing homes, but the Health Department has ignored questions about which nursing homes would be subject to the tests.

The Florida Department of Corrections had also refused to acknowledge inmate deaths or provide details on the testing of inmates at state facilities on Wednesday, after the News Service of Florida reported that two inmates at Blackwater River Correctional Facility, a privately run prison in the Florida Panhandle. The publication obtained the information through the Santa Rosa County Medical Examiner’s Office — data that the state has argued should not be released to the public on the grounds that COVID-19 death information obtained by medical examiner’s offices falls under state epidemiological investigations.

In Miami-Dade, the Medical Examiner’s Office turned over data Thursday on coronavirus-related deaths to the Miami Herald. The office made public the names, ages and dates and places of death for all 178 people who’d died as of Wednesday afternoon from the coronavirus.

The Herald and other news outlets, however, are planning to file suit against the state to obtain the names of the nursing homes with coronavirus outbreaks. The Herald found a new law firm to represent the news organization after DeSantis’ general counsel pressured Holland & Knight to drop the case. The firm had sent a standard, five-day notification letter to the state informing DeSantis of the Herald’s plans to file a lawsuit.

Families, Florida lawmakers and first responders have also urged the state to release the names of the nursing homes with confirmed cases. “Given what we’re facing, I just think we have to get past the old ways of doing things and open the flow of information,” Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood, who has called for the state to make the information public, wrote Tuesday on Facebook.

Testing for the virus remains one of the most critical issues facing the state but the Florida Department of Health has yet to provide contracts with the private labs that have done the bulk of the work in Florida. And for days, it has been unable to provide details about a backlog of private testing results, which experts say could help epidemiologists map out the forecasts that have helped governments track the spread of the virus, prepare hospitals for potential surges — and inform decisions about when it becomes safe to remove social-distancing and other precautions.

“What we need is a complete picture of all the tests and the results. Otherwise, it’s like flying by instruments but the instruments haven’t been plugged in yet,” said Kenneth Goodman, director of the University of Miami’s Institute of Bioethics and Health Policy. “It’s all about data.”

Miami Herald staff writers Daniel Chang, Ben Conarck, Samantha Gross, Douglas Hanks, Carol Marbin Miller and David Ovalle, and Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau correspondents Mary Ellen Klas and Lawrence Mower contributed to this report.

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