Rokita rehashes fight over COVID-19 data, questioning Holcomb's pandemic restrictions

Attorney General Todd Rokita is rehashing the debate over the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing a report that questions the data the state used to make decisions about lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closings.

The Republican, who is running for reelection, released an analysis of data by his office late last week that honed in on imperfections in COVID-19 data. The report concludes that Gov. Eric Holcomb's administration exaggerated deaths and rates of the virus to justify government restrictions that hurt the economy and education systems. A spokesperson for Holcomb referred questions to state health department officials, who did not respond.

While public health experts are at odds with the report's finding, a political scientist viewed the report as Rokita's attempt to position himself as an anti-establishment candidate ahead of his re-election campaign.

"Typically as the incumbent, you would think someone like Rokita would be a shoo-in," said Laura Merrifield Wilson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis. "But he has been more controversial, so I have no doubt there are Republican candidates out there."

Bringing the focus back to COVID-19 may prove a winning issue for Rokita, she said. Many Republican voters did not like Holcomb's handling of the pandemic, despite Indiana being one of the first states to remove restrictions in 2020.

The quarantine requirements, business restrictions and school closures were controversial during the early years of the pandemic, as some people wanted to see strict rules to protect the most vulnerable people. Others wanted to prioritize personal freedoms to keep businesses open and avoid masks.

That debate extended to disagreements over COVID-19 deaths and rates.

While there are others who share Rokita's concerns about the data, numerous studies and health officials warn that the concern should be flipped: COVID-19 deaths may be undercounted. Many on this side of the debate criticized government officials for allowing millions across the country to die to prop up the economy.

This confusion stemmed from the reality that data is often imperfect, said Brian Edward Dixon, Director of Public Health Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute and a professor at the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health.

"When you're looking week by week or month by month in terms of diseases like influenza and COVID-19, you're really looking for trends in the data, right?" Dixon said. "So we're often worried less about the precise numbers and more about the trends when making decisions at a policy level."

The report also alleges that deaths that were the result of car accidents or drownings or other traumatic events were misclassified as due to COVID-19, adding that deaths where other health issues contributed also inflated the death figures.

Dixon said while it's likely that some deaths were misclassified by coroners or doctors, this happened very occasionally and should not meaningfully skew the data. And, he added, it's common for people to die from multiple health problems. COVID-19 could worsen chronic health issues like heart disease, causing deadly complications.

Rokita also criticized the COVID-19 positivity rate calculations, which looked at what portion of total tests were positive. He said it's likely people were counted multiple times for a single infection. At the start of the pandemic health workers may have miscounted a single infection as two due to a lack of understanding of how long the virus stayed in a person's body, Dixon said. However, that was soon fixed as doctors better understood the length of a COVID infection.

Health experts have also criticized public health officials for undercounting cases because of swaths of people who fell ill were never tested.

Efforts to improve COVID-19 tracking have resulted in tools like wastewater sampling, which detects COVID-19 levels in the community instead of selective testing.

Experts say that data sets need to be read together to get a more accurate picture of COVID-19's impact.

Binghui Huang can be reached at 317-385-1595 and [email protected]

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: AG Todd Rokita rehashes fight over COVID-19 data and pandemic rules