West Virginia facilities failed to report 168 COVID-19 deaths

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) announced on Wednesday that an estimated 168 COVID-19 deaths went unreported in the state.

Seventy health care facilities in the state failed to report all of their coronavirus-related deaths, Justice said, citing information from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.

According to State Health Officer Ayne Amjad, the facilities spanned 30 counties in the state.

“This is totally unacceptable,” Justice said at a press briefing. “Totally unacceptable in every way.”

The unreported deaths were from hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living, hospice and home deaths. Two of the deaths were reportedly individuals from jail facilities who were brought to the hospital and died, Justice said.

Half of the unreported deaths, however, occurred in hospitals, Justice said. According to Amjad, these facilities were not reporting deaths in accordance with the policies set in April 2020. 

Amjad added that the fatalities were discovered when the death certificates began filing into the organization’s vital registration endpoint.

In the wake of these revelations, the state is changing the way it reports cases: rather than matching data on a bi-weekly basis, Amjad said that the state will begin to do so on a weekly basis, that way they can report information accurately and quicker if possible.

Justice said he will honor the individuals whose deaths went unreported on Friday.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is currently under fire for underreporting coronavirus deaths after the state’s attorney general released a report in January concluding that New York undercounted deaths caused by COVID-19 in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.

In early March, The Wall Street Journal reported that advisers to Cuomo engaged in a cover-up, pushing state health officials to make changes to a public report from July that looked at COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.

As of Wednesday morning, West Virginia had 134,158 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 2,330 deaths.

Updated at 2:19 p.m.