Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Florida's Republican Governor Orders 1,200+ Cases/Deaths Deleted From State Totals To Boost His Case For Further Re-Opening

The Republican Governor of Florida fired the state's top coronavirus data scientist, Rebekah Jones, from her position at the Department of Health on May 18, because she would not lie about the numbers of SARS-CoV-2 cases and deaths.

Jones had been the Manager of Data and Surveillance and created the state's online database. She has created new database (FloridaCOVIDAction.com), which asserts that Florida is underreporting how many people have tested positive while overcounting how many have been tested. The purpose of these lies is to convince Floridians that Governor Ron DeSantis, a member of Donald Trump's Death Cult, is correct to re-open the state.

Jones: "People have a right to know what's going on in a straightforward nonpolitical kind of way."

Jones says she was fired for refusing to "manipulate" COVID-19 data. DeSantis said she was fired because "she didn't listen to the people who were her superiors." ... That sounds like they are in perfect agreement about her termination.

TC Palm:
One of Jones' most controversial claims after her firing was that the state fiddled with the so-called positivity rate to make it easier to justify reopening counties that weren't ready by using the wrong testing data to draw its conclusions.

On [June 11], the Health Department's site declared more than 1.3 million "total people tested" in bold type on its website. But Jones' website says the true figure is about 30 percent less, just over 1 million.

The state's testing tally reflects the number of tests conducted, not how many people were tested, a state data guide shows.

The figure Jones reports isn't on any easily viewed public website maintained by the state. It can be found by downloading data non-programmers would find incomprehensible. The Post uses that data for a county-by-county testing map that has been on its website since March.

If Florida is indeed misreporting how many people have been tested, it makes the health situation in Florida look better than it is. By dividing the number of cases into the number of tests instead of the number of people tested, the state erroneously reports a lower percentage of people testing positive, Jones said. ...

A Health Department manager asked Jones in early May to hide state data from public view the night before The Post reported that Floridians felt COVID-19 symptoms as early as January. Jones told her boss in an email it was the "wrong call" but removed the data.

After The Post story published, it was returned to the site.

Jones was removed from her data management duties on May 5, she said, in retaliation for refusing to "manipulate" the data to make coronavirus look less prevalent among those getting tested for the pathogen.

On May 29, the state's dashboard went offline for a day, hidden behind a login screen, when a Health Department worker tried to program the software powering the dashboard to make the data private.
Jones tweeted yesterday that multiple sources at Florida's Department of Health have told her they were instructed to delete deaths and cases so the state's numbers look better and DeSantis will have more support when he implements further re-opening measures. Jones said she has independently verified that at least 1,200 cases have been deleted in the last week.

Republicans are finally getting to respond to this crisis the way they wanted to in the first place - by actively making conditions worse, so more people get sick and die.

It's premeditated murder.
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