'Governor Baker must reverse course': Warren and Pressley urge state officials to reconsider change to COVID-19 hospitalization data

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Ayanna Pressley are urging Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration to reconsider the state’s recent move to stop reporting demographic data on COVID-19 hospitalizations, calling the metric a critical part of ensuring an equitable recovery from the pandemic.

“Governor Baker must reverse course,” Pressley told Boston.com in a statement.

In separate statement, Warren also pressed the Baker administration to continue to report COVID hospitalization data broken down by age, race, and sex.

The administration announced its move to stop reporting demographic COVID-19 hospitalization data on its interactive dashboard last week. The small change was among a host of data reporting tweaks “to reflect the improving trends,” with 73 percent of Massachusetts adults fully vaccinated and infection rates subsiding across the state.

Hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in Massachusetts have also dropped from over 2,400 to just 85 over the past six months. And the Department of Public Health is continuing to report COVID-19 cases and deaths by age, race, and sex.

However, with COVID-19 vaccination still lagging in communities of color and the more transmissible Delta variant of the virus on the rise, Warren and Pressley — who have consistently pushed for COVID-19 data at the national level broken down by race and ethnicity — say the state is losing an important tool to track and respond to the racially disparate impacts of the pandemic.

“That which gets measured gets done,” Pressley said, “and scaling back the collection and publication of demographic data on COVID hospitalizations will only hurt our efforts to address the disparate impact of COVID-19 on Black and brown communities and target resources to the communities most impacted.”

“Demographic data collection on all aspects of the COVID response, including but not limited to vaccination and testing, is critical to help us equitably respond to the pandemic,” Warren said. “Congresswoman Pressley and I have been calling for CDC to collect this data since the early days of the pandemic and I urge the Baker administration to continue to collect and make public demographic data on COVID-19 hospitalizations.”

The two Democratic lawmakers’ calls come after the Massachusetts-based Vaccine Equity Now coalition raised concerns about the change.

“The reality is it’s a complicated situation and the top line narratives, when everything is in aggregate, misses and leaves out the inequities,” Dr. Atyia Martin, a co-chair of the coalition, said in an interview.

Martin said the detailed hospitalization data had provided better insight into COVID-19’s impact in the state’s hardest hit communities than do case counts or deaths, the latter of which have been in the single digits since early May.

Martin noted that the average number of COVID-19 tests taken each day in Massachusetts has plunged since April, and less-serious “breakthrough infections” in already-vaccinated individuals are expected to make up an increasing share of positive tests. Those factors make infection counts a less meaningful measurement, while hospitalization data “tells a story about the severity of the disease that people are getting,” she said.

While she said the Baker administration has made some progress closing racial disparities in the vaccine rollout, Black and Latino residents remain roughly 22 percent and 25 percent less likely, respectively, to be vaccinated than white residents, according to DPH data. Several cities, including New Bedford and Springfield, have yet to even at least partially vaccinate 50 percent of their population.

Baker’s administration has pushed to target those communities with its recent vaccination efforts. However, Martin fears that the gaps will leave Black and Latino residents vulnerable to future upticks and that the impacts will be tougher to track without racial data on COVID-19 hospitalizations.

“It’s particularly scary with this Delta variant,” she said.

DPH officials did not respond to requests for comment on the decision to stop reporting demographic data for COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Martin says that the reasoning the coalition received from the administration was that the data from hospitals had been incomplete. But if that was the case, she questioned why the decision was made to stop now.

“Why did we report it for five months if it wasn’t an accurate?” Martin said. “It’s a bizarre position to take. Many folks who are trying to support their communities used that data to help them prioritize their resources.”