At 4:13 this afternoon the Washington Post named the other five states. Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire and North Carolina, joining Missouri. That is the expansion of the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak this country has ever recorded, from nine states to fifteen, and it is attributed to a fourth person familiar with the investigation who is not permitted to say their name. The Post adds that the investigation continues to evolve and the number could change again. CDC did not respond to its request for comment.

I have just been back through every federal page. CDC’s outbreak page says nine. Its investigation update says nine and still puts the count at 1,947. Its map of where people got sick says nine. Its surveillance page says nine. FDA’s advisory says nine, is titled Investigation of 9-State Outbreak, and has not been touched since July 24.

This is how you found out today that your state is part of the largest outbreak of this parasite in American history. You read it in a newspaper. Behind a paywall. Sourced to somebody who is not allowed to be named.

None of that is a criticism of the Post. Lena Sun and Rachel Roubein have been ahead of this outbreak for three weeks and they have been right every single time. On July 24 they had the last expansion too, and that one at least had an agency update posted behind it. This one does not. What has changed in twelve days is not the quality of the journalism. It is that a newspaper has quietly become the announcement channel for a federal foodborne-illness investigation, and the federal government has become the place you go afterward to see whether it has caught up.

Now the arithmetic, because it is worse than it looks. Those fifteen states report 21,393 cases among themselves — Michigan alone reports 11,508. The federal figure for the outbreak is 1,947. Put the other way: thirty-five states are not in this outbreak, and they report 1,902 cases between them.

Two things in the new list are worth stopping on.

The first is Nebraska. Nebraska is not on Taylor Farms’ distribution list. The company’s own recall noticenames twenty-seven states that received the recalled shredded iceberg and Nebraska is not among them. Neither is West Virginia, which has been in this outbreak since the beginning. Two of the fifteen outbreak states are therefore places where, according to the company that made the product, the product never went.

Douglas County, which is Omaha, reported on July 20 that eating at Taco Bell was the most common exposureamong the cases it had interviewed, with nearly two thirds naming the restaurant in the two weeks before they got sick. Nebraskans were eating this lettuce at Taco Bell in a state where, according to the company, the lettuce was never sent. The explanation is not sinister, and it is not complicated. The recall notice records where Taylor Farms shipped directly, and Taco Bell’s own distributors likely carried it the rest of the way. Which means the twenty-seven-state list is a shipping manifest and not a map of where this lettuce was eaten, and everyone who has been checking it to see whether their state was affected has been reading the wrong document.

North Carolina is the reversal in the list. A week ago, NCDHHS told the public that its increase did not appear to be associated with the Taco Bell outbreak, and that its patients were reporting parsley and cilantro more often than expected. Today the state is in the lettuce outbreak. It may still turn out that North Carolina was right about there being more than one thing happening — 718 cases is a great deal to explain with one restaurant chain, and the state said plainly that many of its patients ate neither herb.

And New Hampshire raises the question I flagged this morning, before the names came out. New Hampshire has thirty-three cases and seventeen of them are tied to recalled Taylor Farms lettuce at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene — a hospital, not a Taco Bell.

The fifty states are reporting 23,295 cases today. Michigan added 274 today alone and has recorded two deaths. CDC’s outbreak page acknowledged those two deaths yesterday. Its investigation update, on the same site, still says no deaths have been reported, and FDA’s advisory still says zero. All of them still say nine states and have since July 24.

The Post says the number of states could still change. I believe that. And when it does, we will all read about it in the Post.