The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is legally seeking the number of Michigan nursing home deaths from COVID-19 in December. | Adobe Stock
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is legally seeking the number of Michigan nursing home deaths from COVID-19 in December. | Adobe Stock
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation is suing the state of Michigan to receive information on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Charlie LeDuff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Jan. 27 to see a record of all coronavirus deaths in December 2020.
“Not only does the public have the right to know this information, we have the need to know,” LeDuff said, according to the Mackinac Center's website. “It has become patently clear that this disease has attacked the most vulnerable, namely the institutionalized elderly. If we’re going to fix end-of-life care moving forward, it’s going to require a hard look at how the state’s policies treated our most vulnerable population.”
The request only sought the age of the patients and the date of death. Despite this, the state of Michigan claimed that revealing the information would be a privacy violation. All the reporter received in response to his request was a link to an official website, which only summarized data but did not provide the information he was seeking.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) offers copies of death certificates to the public, which contain more information than LeDuff was requesting. Additionally, in Michigan, information that could be used to identify a person can be redacted from FOIA requests.
“It is essential that the public have access to data about nursing home deaths in Michigan,” said Steve Delie, the Mackinac Center’s head on transparency and open government, according to its website. “Unfortunately, rather than simply providing anonymous data, the state has refused to shed light on this important matter. As more scandals plague other states’ COVID response, it is no longer acceptable for the government to provide statistics and ask citizens to simply accept them as true.”
The state of Michigan says that vital records are not covered by the state’s FOIA. It also said complying with this request would reveal personal health information, which is protected under the law. In an attempt at transparency, the state of Michigan's website placed an asterisk on its statistics, noting that new death records had been found in a vital records search.
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