One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager lost her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 data, she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.
On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Gov. Ron DeSantis said she had been fired.
According to the emails, department staff gave the order shortly after reporters requested the same data from the agency on May 5. The data manager, Rebekah Jones, complied with the order, but not before she told her supervisors it was the “wrong call...”
The dashboard that Jones managed is the best official source for in-depth data on how the deadly pandemic is moving through the state. Studying it is the surest way to know where outbreaks are growing and where testing is being done. Without access to the data, Floridians would have to rely on the word of officials and politicians without being able to verify for themselves...
In her Friday email to subscribers of a COVID data listserv, Jones said she was reassigned on May 5 “[f]or reasons beyond my division’s control” and warned that whoever took over may be less straightforward.
“As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” she wrote.
“They are making a lot of changes. I would advise being diligent in your respective uses of this data.”
Jones also told CBS12 in Tallahassee on Monday that she refused to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen” the state...
DeSantis did this before when a medical expert challenged the narrative that the GOP Governor was trying to sell to the public a month ago. That narrative, by the by, is that "ALL IS WELL!" and we should re-open the entire state to business so that corporations can resume generating profits at the expense of everyone's health and safety.
For DeSantis to justify reopening just six weeks after shutting things down to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, he has to have numbers showing a consistent decrease in infectees getting reported. If there's even one day of the numbers going up, it breaks the count and resets to a new one. Given how the virus can flare up - even in contained locations like Singapore and South Korea, a surge can happen - it's next to impossible for the numbers to behave the way DeSantis wants.
So he'll do the next best Republican thing he can think of: Lie about the numbers. And he can only get away with that if he can control the data.
There's a huge problem to all this: Florida, like a lot of places in the U.S., does not have enough testing kits and resources to check the population on a regular basis to identify and isolate hot spots at a given notice. Without that, a high number of our neighbors and coworkers and family members are going to be walking around spreading COVID without warning until it's too late. Flare-ups will be unavoidable.
This is also in violation of what had been a strong set of transparency rules - the famed Sunshine Law - that is supposed to keep our leaders accountable to the voters.
And because DeSantis will now be lying about the numbers, they will be uncountable. Leaving him and his Republican cronies unaccountable.
This is a major scandal for Florida. Our own leadership is intentionally working to hide or fake the numbers of an ongoing health care crisis just so they could force a lot of poor residents back to work, just so the rich can get richer while the rest of us get sick and risk dying.
What the hell can the residents do to fight back against their own government?!
1 comment:
Denying cases exist does not, in fact make them go away or stop them from spreading the virus.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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