The push for a controversial change in the reporting of Denver jail coronavirus cases came from the Denver Mayor’s Office in consultation with sheriff’s officials despite earlier denials of involvement, newly released records show.

In late May, Denver’s largest jail changed how it was counting coronavirus cases and reporting them to the state for outbreak tracking. The change led to the publicly reported number being cut in half on May 27. Instead of publicly reporting all of the positive and probable COVID-19 cases in the jail, only cases where the virus’ transmission is believed to have happened in the jail have since been shared with the public.

Records previously provided to The Gazette under the Colorado Open Records Act showed dozens of top officials from the state and county health departments, the Denver Sheriff Department and Denver Health, a public hospital that contracts to provide medical services in the jail, helped brainstorm a way to reclassify some of the positive and suspected COVID-19 cases so they would no longer be included in the total. Additional emails more recently turned over provide new details on the change, showing that the call to “rectify” the numbers came from Denver Mayor’s Office, in coordination with the Denver sheriff.

In total, the emails revealed displeasure among the officials about media outlets’ reports of a spike in the jail’s coronavirus cases, and the fast work to find a way to publicly report fewer numbers. The change meant Denver’s largest jail began reporting their cases unlike other correctional facilities in the state, and in contradiction to some of the state’s own documentation about how to report the cases. A lawyer with Colorado’s American Civil Liberties Union who has been tracking coronavirus cases in Colorado called the change “completely misleading.”

The emails previously provided to The Gazette didn’t make clear who pushed to revise counting methods. Spokespeople from the agencies and people included in the emails said they didn’t know or couldn’t recall why so many top agency officials and staff sprang into synchronized action the morning after the news reports. In some instances, they didn’t respond to questions about the changes.

Spokespeople for the sheriff and mayor have still not answered who exactly called for the change. The top officials involved in the effort, including Denver’s sheriff and the executive director of the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, have declined to be interviewed about the matter.

Among the newly released records, the spokesperson for Sheriff Elias Diggins, who was then the jail’s chief officer, wrote in an email to then-Sheriff Frances Gomez, Diggins, several top deputies and two Denver Health staff:

“The Mayor’s Office has Bob Mcdonald, DDPHE executive director, reaching out to CDPHE (the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment) to see how we can rectify the numbers …,” Diggins’ spokesperson wrote.

Thirty-nine minutes later, Diggins sent a daily report to Gomez and other top department staff, describing the day’s most important issues. The first item Diggins described was the news reports about the jail’s coronavirus spike, and the beginning of the effort that ultimately led to the publicly reported numbers being cut in half.

“Inaccurate news stories have caused concern regarding the actual number of COVID cases. Public Safety leadership met this morning with the Mayor’s Office and others to discuss,” Diggins wrote.

Despite Diggins calling the stories inaccurate, an email sent about 30 minutes later from a DDPHE epidemiologist to Diggins, McDonald and DDPHE’s Director Danica Lee said the numbers are “how outbreak numbers are typically reported.”

The sheriff’s spokesperson acknowledged that Diggins was in the meeting. The Sheriff Department and Mayor’s Office have not answered questions about what input they gave during the meeting. None of the people involved have agreed to be interviewed about the matter, and written questions sent to the Sheriff Department, the Mayor’s Office, McDonald and DDPHE’s communications staff have not been answered, specifically regarding who directed McDonald to “rectify” the numbers.

Emails previously provided to The Gazette showed that dozens of staff from several agencies, including the Denver Mayor’s Office, the Denver Sheriff Department, DDPHE, CDPHE and Denver Health scrambled to figure out why their numbers had spiked, then turned to lowering the number of cases they were reporting to CDPHE.

Lee, DDPHE’s director, suggested some positive aspects that their public messaging could focus on. “We also would like to offer a few talking points for consideration…” she wrote to Diggins and others, including Gomez. She recommended highlighting the department’s collaboration with the jail, and also pointed to new control measures, testing of asymptomatic cases, adherence to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and an effort to isolate inmates infected with COVID-19 when discharged from the jail.

Diggins, along with the spokespeople for the Denver Sheriff’s Office and Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, also offered ideas for shaping the response to the spike in numbers.

Later that day, Bill Burman, the director of Denver Health wrote to the CDPHE director, Rachel Herlihy, and CDPHE chief medical officer, Eric France, asking them, “What can be done to fix this?”

That evening, a CDPHE epidemiologist sent an email saying that perhaps CDPHE could count and report only cases that they believe originated inside the jail and exclude from their counts inmates who were positive or probable coronavirus cases when they were booked into the jail.

Six days later, on May 27, when CDPHE released their updated outbreak list, the jail’s numbers dropped from 581 to 398, by excluding inmates with positive or probable cases when they entered the jail.

If the jail had used the same counting and reporting method they had previously been using — the same method used by other correctional facilities —it would have reported 613 cases on May 27.

It took the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment nearly a month to provide a complete breakdown of the cases that explained the May 27 decrease and make clear what the number would have been using the initial counting method. Where the city, county and state coronavirus cases information can be found online, the breakdown of positive and probable coronavirus cases included and excluded in the jail’s count is not available.

Days after the change, and after The Gazette began asking for records related to the drop in cases, CDPHE staff altered an internal document that described how outbreak numbers were to be reported. The changes made to the document allowed for the method used in the Denver jail.

But in the outbreak files provided on CDPHE’s website, the data dictionary has never been changed, and describes the counts as the number of residents who are confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19, with a note further explaining, “in a correctional setting, these are inmates/detainees.” There is no explanation that these counts exclude inmates or detainees who were booked into the Denver jail with a confirmed or probable case.

An attorney from the local ACLU said the change, which came without a public explanation, has distorted the public’s understanding of the extent of the coronavirus prevalence in the jail. And their organization sued the state over its handling of the pandemic at the Weld County jail, based on the numbers being reported in the outbreak file. With the data changed, potential legal and policy action can’t be properly weighed, the attorney said, on top of the public being left with inconsistent and incomplete counts.