For more than two months, the Tampa Bay Times and other news organizations have been asking Florida for data that breaks down how many vaccinated people have been infected, hospitalized or died of COVID-19. They are called “breakthrough” cases, data that would show how effectively the vaccine has protected Floridians — and how vulnerable the unvaccinated are.
But the Florida Department of Health has continually refused those requests, citing what public health and legal experts say are misplaced privacy concerns.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also refuses to release that data, deferring to the state on whether to share it publicly. It’s information Florida residents and researchers have repeatedly asked for. Now it’s crucial to determine how vulnerable Floridians are to omicron, the highly contagious variant that quickly became the dominant strain in the U.S. “It’s the number one thing that people ask me for,” said University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. That data may be more important than ever, he said, because it’s “especially pertinent to how omicron may or may not spread.” Breakthrough cases demonstrate how effective vaccines are and can also show how that protection changes over time. Immunity from initial vaccinations wanes 3 to 6 months later, health experts say, so boosters are crucial to fighting off the new variant. Nearly 2.6 million Floridians have contracted the coronavirus since the first vaccine was approved in December 2020, and nearly 42,000 have died from COVID-19 since then. But there is no public data that shows how many were unvaccinated. Nor is there public data that shows how many vaccinated people got breakthrough infections, and whether they had the added protection of booster shots. For example, if Florida released breakthrough data, then we would know how many of the state’s 29,568 new COVID-19 infections — a 118 percent jump from the previous week’s caseload — and 194 new deaths reported Friday were vaccinated or unvaccinated. While Florida won’t release breakthrough data, officials did reveal what some of that data shows: About 30 percent of Florida’s new COVID-19 cases found over a 30-day period were breakthrough infections in people who were vaccinated — but hadn’t received a booster shot — according to a Dec. 19 article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Salemi said that single data point doesn’t provide much insight: “One of the most common questions I receive is the extent to which receiving a full series of a COVID-19 vaccine is protecting me from infection, symptomatic illness and hospitalization. “To really answer these questions, it would be valuable to have key COVID-19 metrics reported frequently and stratified by vaccination status and prior infection status.”