Emails obtained from the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser suggest that city officials took down unflattering data from a COVID-19 dashboard in mid-June, rushing to reopen even as the data showed the city failing to meet one key metric for containing the spread of the pandemic. City officials deny they acted to hide the data, and say they safely followed their metrics when moving into Phase Two of their reopening plan.

The emails, released in response to an open-records request by law student Allison Hrabar, cover a period from June 8 to June 21, a day before the city moved to Phase Two of reopening.

https://twitter.com/allisongeroi/status/1304435525563154433?s=20

In an email sent on the morning of Saturday, June 20, D.C. Health Communications Director Kimberly Henderson noticed a spike in community spread of COVID-19 earlier in the month, referring to the number of infectious people in the community. That spike on June 11 disrupted a 14-day decrease in cases, one of the key metrics for moving to Phase Two of reopening. In response, Benjamin Fritsch, a member of Bowser’s communications team, wrote back, “Please hold on posting data. Thank you.”

By noon that day, data about the increase in community spread was posted online. However, within hours it was gone. The emails from Bowser’s office suggest that Fritsch intentionally pushed to remove the data. The following day, Fritsch wrote, “Please do not update the community spread element of the ReOpen dashboard. All the other data is good to go.”

This community spread figure was a key parameter in Phase Two reopening. In a presentation on June 8, city officials named six metrics for reopening: a 14-day sustained decrease in community spread, a low transmission rate, a positivity rate below 15% for 7 days, and hospital capacity below 80% for 14 days. In addition, they set two contact tracing metrics: to make a first contact attempt for 90% of new positive cases within a day, and to attempt to reach the close contacts of 90% of new cases within two days.

The emails released in response to Hrabar’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal the city did not meet its own criteria. On the day D.C. reopened, a staffer in the mayor’s office noted the city had only achieved a 13-day decrease in community spread. Its contact tracing efforts also came up short.

In a statement, the mayor’s office denied that there was an attempt to conceal any COVID-19 data.

“Throughout this pandemic, D.C. has been a leader in transparency and making data publicly available so that Washingtonians have the information they need to protect themselves, their families, and our community. We have and will always strive to ensure the data we present is clear, concise, and accurate. The emails reflect the process, and we present the data in a way that is understandable and gives residents and press confidence in our response and recovery efforts,” the office wrote. 

Further, a source in the mayor’s office said the city took down the community spread data initially because the unusual development required a more detailed explanation. The mayor’s office says it posted the June 11 spike in cases later in the week, and the community spread data that’s now available includes that rise. According to the mayor’s office, D.C. reached a 14-day sustained decrease on June 18, and reopened days later to give businesses time to prepare.

That claim, however, contradicts several increases in community spread: on June 8, on June 11 and again on June 15.

Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says one-day upticks in cases can have different meanings. Sometimes they indicate a wider spread of the virus, and sometimes they simply reflect a large testing event. Still, he says removing the data was the wrong call.

“The right thing to have done would have been to hold off on the reopening and confirm that this is an isolated uptick, or to confirm the fact that community transmission is increasing again,” Beyrer says.

In D.C., however, the consequences do not appear to have been dire, he says. Cases increased slightly, then plateaued, and new cases drifted down from mid-August. In total, 616 people died of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Contact tracers now reach nearly all new cases within a day.

“They’re reporting pretty good rates of contact tracing and increasing rates of testing,” Beyrer says. “Those are all elements of getting the epidemic under control.”

Still, there are ominous signs. Sept. 10 saw another peak in cases with 81 new infections reported. Hospitals were at 84% capacity the same day. D.C. remains far from moving to Phase Three of its reopening plan.

Hrabar, 26, says monotony drove her to look at the data. She says she was observing strict quarantine “because I don’t have great lungs,” and began monitoring the daily numbers the city published on COVID-19. 

“In June I became very obsessed with it and I was just checking it every day and just seeing what our progress was,” she says. “I just started noticing it was inconsistent or poorly reported, so I started posting screenshots on Twitter.”

She is now attending law school remotely at New York University while living in D.C.

Hrabar forwarded to DCist/WAMU the FOIA requests she sent to the mayor’s office and the D.C. Health. She also filed a request with the Office of the Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, which posts data to the coronavirus dashboard. Only the mayor’s office provided her with documents.