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.
Shivani Patel, a social epidemiologist and assistant professor at Emory University called the move “extremely problematic,” especially since it came without warning or explanation during a rise in cases. “It shouldn’t be left to the public, to scientists, national policy makers or the media to guess as to what these numbers are,” Patel said. “We know from the beginning that dates matter and that they tell us different things.”
“When you have big surges in deaths, the deaths by date reported will always show an increase while deaths by date occurred will go down,” Salemi said. The Herald also found that during the last two surges the trend lines using date of death showed peaks 25% and 8% percent higher respectively than the corresponding peaks by report date.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.
The CDC eventually confirmed what experts had hypothesized after comparing the new data to previous reports — that the Florida Department of Health had begun to report deaths by date of death. The change was also reflected in data about new cases, which went from being counted by date of report to “the date of specimen collection, confirmed COVID-19 laboratory test result, or clinical diagnosis,” according to the CDC website.
The DOH weekly report notes “death counts include individuals who meet a standardized national surveillance case definition” but includes no descriptions of how the health department presents the numbers. “The CDC has started displaying the Department’s submitted retrospective file twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays, which updates previous day deaths that were subsequently reported to the Department,” Khoury explained for the first time in Monday’s statement. The difference can be an addition of eight deaths one day, and 901 the following day, as happened in the middle of last week.
This altering of Covid numbers sounds familiar, like Cuomo & NY. It might be time for an investigation into DeSantis' practices.