South Carolina's health agency has stopped providing local authorities with a feed to ZIP code-level data about coronavirus spread, interrupting how some local governments direct their fight against COVID-19.
Municipalities that rely on that formatted data will have to manually update ZIP code information, or do without for at least a few days. City of Charleston officials said that's keeping them from using the city's dashboard to strategize testing locations and inform spread-mitigation policies.
The state Department of Health and Environmental Control told The Post and Courier the disabled data needed more legal protections to make sure the information couldn't lead to any individual patient being identified.
"While we're committed to providing our partners with the timely and accurate data they need to make discussions and take precautions to protect the health and safety of the public, we are also responsible for protecting the identifiable public health information of those we serve," DHEC spokeswoman Laura Renwick said.
The department didn't immediately respond to questions on Thursday about how such ZIP code-level data could identify individuals.
Charleston relies on data
Tracy McKee, Charleston's chief innovation officer, said the city spent several weeks designing a local dashboard to use DHEC's ZIP code data. While DHEC posts the data on the statewide dashboard, Charleston's site isn't built to process numbers in that format.
On Monday, DHEC emailed several local officials to inform them that, come Wednesday, the agency would no longer share ZIP code-level data with the raw data feed the city uses to automatically update its dashboard. The Post and Courier obtained copies of the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.
McKee responded that the warning didn't give her enough time to prepare for the missing data.
"In Charleston, the ZIP code data drives our entire data-driven approach to operations," McKee wrote to DHEC in a Tuesday email. "I certainly hope that this is simply DHEC decision-makers unaware of how vital this data is to municipalities and the ZIP code level data will remain an open data source."
McKee said she trusts that DHEC values the need for information, and hopes the agency's leaders will soon return to the cooperation that's characterized data sharing since the pandemic began.
New portal still in 'testing mode'
DHEC's Lowcountry medical director, Dr. Katherine Richardson, told McKee the department was trying to develop a portal that would allow it to work around a data-sharing agreement mentioned in the announcement email. Municipalities should regain access to the data "in a few days," Richardson wrote.
Veronica Moore, DHEC's GIS program manager, said the department was "still in testing mode" on Wednesday morning, and working on the term agreements. Once it's ready, partners will have to agree to keep the data confidential, then regain access to the full range of data, according to DHEC.
Medical University of South Carolina spokeswoman Heather Woolwine said MUSC has still been able to gather the data for its dashboard, but it now takes longer for its experts to work on the analysis.
But the city didn't design its site to do so, McKee said, and doesn't have the resources to manually input so many numbers regularly.
"At a minimum, we'd really have to go back and rebuilt all those tools," McKee said. "I can't think of a time where we've had something this critical to our (coronavirus dashboard) operations."
Call for ZIP data once called 'distraction'
ZIP code-level data has posed challenges for DHEC in the past.
The agency called the demand for hyperlocal data a "disturbing distraction" in March, but briefly released a breakdown of known cases by ZIP code.
But DHEC later removed the data it had posted, and state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell said she feared that residents outside of known hotspots would use the numbers as an excuse to ignore social distancing guidelines.
When leaders across the state criticized that move, Gov. Henry McMaster ordered the department to post updated numbers.
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SC municipalities for now can't access feed to coronavirus data broken up by ZIP code - Charleston Post Courier
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