The USA TODAY Network in New England and the Documenting COVID-19 project partnered to investigate how New England became a positive data anomaly in terms of COVID death reporting accuracy. Across the region, excess deaths during the pandemic are almost completely accounted for by official COVID deaths. In other parts of the country, these COVID deaths were missed or certified incorrectly as other causes.

MuckRock recently reported on the State of Rhode Island’s one-time plan to eliminate blood lead levels in children. Here we break down where the numbers on these instances come from and what they’re missing.

Data from Rhode Island show efforts to eliminate lead poisoning have not succeeded, but government officials and community organizers both find progress in the effort.

In order to get a better sense of what’s truly going on with public records laws, we decided to take a look at data from over 2,600 agencies in MuckRock’s API. The numbers show the staggering differences in state and local average response times as well as the number of requests filed and completed in those states.

Driven by movements for police accountability, civilian oversight agencies have become commonplace across the county. But often politically weak and under-resourced, they fail to live up to the aspirations of the activists that fight for them. In Providence, Rhode Island, a civilian oversight agency works to reestablish its legitimacy.