Wrong again. Once again, not even close.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/florida-covid-19-deaths
Report: Florida May Have Undercounted Its COVID-19 Deaths by Thousands
What’s 4,924 extra deaths between friends?
BY
BESS LEVIN
MARCH 30, 2021
BY PAUL HENNESSY/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES.
If you found yourself in Florida at any point in the last 12 months and change, you might have felt like you stepped into a portal to an alternative universe. Last spring, when other parts of the country were already in full-fledged lockdowns, the Sunshine State resisted such measures, not issuing stay-at-home orders until
weeks after the World Health Organization had officially
declared COVID-19 a pandemic. At no point did Florida impose a statewide mask mandate, and in September, Governor
Ron DeSantis banned local officials from enforcing their own orders. The state reopened well before most of the nation and,
earlier this month, DeSantis “rolled out the red carpet for visitors,” in particular the millions of spring breakers who descended on the area.
All of that might lead one to believe that things are just peachy down South, and that somehow Florida had avoided the virus entirely. Of course, that’s not actually the case at all. After California and Texas, Florida has had the
most coronavirus cases since the pandemic began last year, and earlier this month
crossed the 2 million mark. In the last week, the number of variant cases
doubled to 2,330, while the overall number of new cases has been rising steadily and averaged nearly
5,000 per day. As of March 29, 2021, more than 33,000 people have
died in the state. And, according to
a new report from Yahoo News, the number may actually be closer to 40,000.
New research published earlier this month in the American Journal of Public Health argues that Florida is undercounting the number of people who died from COVID-19 by thousands of cases, casting new doubt on claims that Gov. Ron DeSantis navigated the coronavirus pandemic successfully…. The impact of the pandemic in Florida “is significantly greater than the official COVID-19 data suggest,” the researchers wrote. They came to that conclusion by comparing the number of estimated deaths for a six-month period in 2020, from March to September, to the actual number of deaths that occurred, a figure known as “excess deaths” because they exceed the estimate.
In the case of Florida, the researchers say, 4,924 excess deaths should have been counted as resulting from COVID-19 but for the most part were ruled as having been caused by something else, thus lowering Florida’s coronavirus fatality count. That’s possible because people who die from COVID-19 often have comorbidities, such as diabetes and asthma. That leaves some discretion for medical examiners, who have sometimes struggled with conflicting science and been subject to political pressures during the pandemic. In Florida, the state’s 25 district medical examiners are directly appointed by the governor. Last spring, the DeSantis administration was accused of trying to keep those medical examiners from releasing complete coronavirus data. (In August, the state said coronavirus deaths no longer required certification from a medical examiner.)
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“I am sure that COVID-19 is responsible for most of these excess deaths,”
Moosa Tatar, a public health economist at the University of Utah who led the research examining Florida’s excess deaths, told reporter
Alexander Nazaryan. (Not everyone agrees:
Jason Salemi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida, told Yahoo News that it would be incorrect to assume that all excess deaths during the period in question can be attributed to COVID-19. “You could’ve never gotten the coronavirus, delayed needed health care, and died from diabetes-related complications. That’s still indirectly tied to the pandemic,” Salemi said.)
Coincidentally, last year, Florida agents
raided the home of former state data scientist
Rebekah Jones, who helped to create the state’s COVID-19 dashboard before she was fired. According to Jones, who
filed a whistleblower complaint against the Department of Health several months prior, she had refused to comply with requests to manipulate data to bolster the claim that Florida had a handle on the pandemic. Law enforcement entered her home with guns drawn and, Jones said at the time, pointed them at her and her children.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office claimed that Jones was fired for “exhibit[ing] a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department.” A search warrant to enter her home was authorized on the basis of a complaint by the Department of Health that a person had “hacked” into their emergency alert system to urge people to speak out about Florida’s coronavirus strategies, though in reality staffers at the Florida Department of Health all
used the same username and password to log into the system, information that was available on the department’s public website. (Jones, who
launched her own online dashboard of Florida coronavirus data after being fired,
told CNN she hadn’t improperly accessed any state messaging system.) “They took my phone and the computer I use every day to post the case numbers in Florida, and school cases for the entire country,” she said after the raid. “They took evidence of corruption at the state level. They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo.”