State Law Preventing Release of COVID-19 Data, DHHS Working on Solution

July 9, 2021, 5:15 a.m. ·

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A week after removing the state's COVID-19 dashboard, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services hopes to resume publishing some pandemic data next week, a spokesperson said.

The state agency plans to publish brief snapshots and trends of COVID data, which is far less than it had been doing in publishing the dashboard since last spring.

The dashboard ended June 30 when Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts also ended the State of Emergency declaration, which suspended some normal state laws during the brunt of the pandemic. Publishing COVID data – likes positive cases, hospitalizations, related deaths and vaccinations – was one of them.

Last week, DHHS said in a press release that similar data would be available from different sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and also via a public records request. However, requests from the media for the data were denied.

That's because of a Nebraska state statute regarding health data and protecting identifiable information and does not allow for DHHS to publish data that could potentially identify a person, according to the spokesperson. The emergency declaration from Gov. Ricketts temporarily suspended that statute. HIPAA – or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act – is the federal law that also protects personal medical information.

The DHHS spokesperson, Olga Dack, said both play a factor into why COVID-19 information is not currently available. She also said Nebraska’s law is even more restrictive than the federal HIPAA law.

“Nebraska is definitely one of the ones where personal information is protected on a higher level," she said.

Right now, the state agency’s legal and data teams are sorting out what COVID information it can and cannot release to the public, Dack said. Since the state dashboard has been canceled, both the Douglas County and Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Departments have both continued to publish COVID data via their county dashboards. That can be done because local health departments are not covered by HIPAA, Dack said.

"This means that, while this state goes back to following both HIPAA and the state statute and how it treats protected and identifiable information, and local health departments are not considered a covered entity under HIPAA in the same manner," she said.

The state agency has not yet finalized plans but plans to release some information in a weekly news release by the end of next week.

The pause in data releases comes as several states bordering Nebraska are seeing a rise in cases tied to the Delta variant. As of mid-week, DHHS said Nebraska has not seen a spike in Delta cases yet.