Ohio's Death Records
Available -- until we needed them to understand the pandemic.
An important case was argued 10-25-23 at the Ohio Supreme Court to get death records released by the Ohio Dept. of Health (ODH). The requester sued to get cause of death data to examine the impact of COVID19 on Ohio’s population. Prior to 2020, these records were routinely produced on request—admitted in another case here. Why does ODH now hide cause of death information? You can listen to the argument here:
Oh, but they're totally not 'hiding'! They say we're perfectly welcome to go to each and every one of the 88 counties and take pictures of each death record, OR we can pay ODH ~$3 million for every year of death records that we want.