The public records lawsuit against the Florida Department of Health over the disappearance of detailed COVID-19 data is on hold after the plaintiff’s lead attorney suffered a family tragedy. Meanwhile, though, the state has filed motions to scuttle the case, claiming the information is both confidential and doesn’t exist in a form that can be publicly released.
The lawsuit, brought by state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, and the nonprofit Florida Center for Government Accountability, had been scheduled for a hearing Wednesday and Thursday before the Second Judicial Circuit in Tallahassee. But the hearing was canceled after the mother of the plaintiff’s lead counsel, Andrea Flynn Mogensen, died unexpectedly late last week.
It’s not clear when the hearing will be rescheduled. Judge John Cooper, assigned to the case, said previously he will be unavailable until November.
Smith said the delay was “unfortunate” but that it was Florida residents who would suffer most.
“Given the tragic reasons for the delay, I don’t think it will hurt our case,” he said. “But it will hurt the citizens of this state, who have a constitutional right to this public health information. Of course, the administration can resolve this immediately by simply restarting the reports that were being published previously on a daily basis.”
The lawsuit, filed Aug. 31, seeks to compel the state to disclose county-by-county information on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, including summaries of the virus’s impact by age, gender, race and ethnicity.
But in a pair of motions filed by the state, attorneys argued that the state doesn’t automatically generate the reports. Instead, they said, the state provides certain COVID-19 data to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but does not routinely summarize the data by demographic categories.
“The [lawsuit] does not allege that the requested records actually exist,” the state’s motion to dismiss claims.
Even if it did, the motions add, “that data, in any format, is confidential” — despite the fact that the Florida Department of Health had produced such summary reports on a near-daily basis until early June.
Smith called the argument “laughable.”
“Their logic is that what was once public information is no longer public information because it is suddenly now confidential,” he said. “Nope — that’s not how public records work.”
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