COVID-19 CONVERSATION: Not Trusting Florida Data

The recent firing of the Florida government employee running the coronavirus public data base, because of her insistence of data validity and usability is evidence that the DeSantis GOP government cannot be trusted with the numbers and place loyalty about science.

Even before the removal of Jones, questions about Florida’s COVID-19 data had persisted. The Herald and a consortium of other news outlets sued the state over its initial refusal to release data about COVID-19 cases and deaths in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. The state finally began releasing data about cases in long-term care data in late April. And the state is inconsistent in how it chooses to represent key data points. Hospitalization data includes the aggregate number of people who have been hospitalized, not current numbers of people hospitalized, but the state replaced the overall case count with the number of “new positive COVID-19 cases.” Gov. DeSantis, who has touted the state’s low positive rate of cases as a justification for reopening the state, initially spoke of the positive rate among all cases, but has more recently focused on the percentage of positives among new cases, which has tended to be lower.

Florida Gov. DeSantis fires data critic for ‘insubordination’ | Miami Herald

COVID-19 CONVERSATION: FL Open No Matter What

There are no clear data that confirm that Florida and South Florida are opening because of medical-scientific reasoning, but rather due mainly to political logic (GOP Governor, Friend of Trump; GOP Miami-Dade Mayor running for Congress), strong business power broker pressures and urgent needs for income of low wage workers, who are being forced back to work by the failed Florida unemployment insurance system.