A report from the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald showed that a decline in Florida’s reported COVID deaths wasn’t a decline at all – it was a purposeful change in how Florida’s Department of Health reported deaths. There’s no way for Governor Ron DeSantis to spin this: The COVID-19 situation in Florida is dire and unless he steps up and starts acting like a leader, Floridians will continue to lose their lives to this deadly virus. 

Miami Herald: Florida changed its COVID-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths

• “As the delta variant spreads through Florida, data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest this could be the most serious and deadly surge in COVID-19 infections since the beginning of the pandemic.”
• “As cases ballooned in August, however, the Florida Department of Health changed the way it reported death data to the CDC, giving the appearance of a pandemic in decline, an analysis of Florida data by the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald found. On Monday, Florida death data would have shown an average of 262 daily deaths reported to the CDC over the previous week had the health department used its former reporting system, the Herald analysis showed. Instead, the Monday update from Florida showed just 46 ‘new deaths’ per day over the previous seven days.”
• “The Florida health department has made several, unannounced changes to its data methodology over the span of the pandemic, abruptly switching between including and disregarding non-resident deaths in its total counts, for example. Salemi said such frequent variations make it difficult to report numbers in a consistent and transparent manner that’s easily understood by the public.”
• “‘What we’re seeing is an active rise in cases where we can’t keep up, an active rise in deaths that, because of using actual date of deaths, has been shifted back in time and we have no idea where we really are,’ said Patel, the epidemiologist from Emory University.”