Longer form, with rebuttal from FL health department at the bottom. I'm unqualified to say what's right here - I have been following MI numbers closely, and have never seen a downward revision, only upward. The restriction to "Residents" seems a bit odd, too, but I've noticed some other states doing this with their numbers as well, mostly places known for being vacation destinations. I want to believe her, since it aligns with my personal prejudices so well, but I'm just not sure what actual public health officials/epidemiologists would think is the right approach to tracking.
https://www.wlrn.org/post/former-florida-data-official-rebekah-jones-state-manipulating-covid-19-data#stream/0
Florida is in a bad place either way.
Anyway, it looks like if you wanted to visit somebody in Florida this year and you did so a few weeks ago, you picked a great time.
1: I think people should give both - local cases, tourists, a combined number totaling in-state cases and totals of their residents out of state if they can get it. And we should find a way to have decent national totals that don't double count.
3: We were very intentional about this calculation, both here and there.
I kind of think it should be reported at point of diagnosis/care/death, no breakdown needed in the public-facing reports, for what it's worth. It doesn't matter at all to me if a college athlete coming in from Florida (let's say) to Ann Arbor is not a Michigan resident. They're not returning home (I hope) anytime soon, and they'll be spreading it (hopefully not) locally, and if things go badly, it's local hospitals that will be treating. But I don't know! More data is usually better, but also sometimes noisier and harder to parse.
And yeah, the travelers were geniuses to go when they did.
1.last is such a shitty article. No effort involved at all. No actual journalism. It's like "we talked to this woman and she said this, then her former employers said something else. The end." The writer and the editor should be ashamed of themselves.
I feel like you are missing the point of Florida.
Anyway, if Florida does report dropping deaths next week, there's no way I'll believe them.
But the overall death rates for the state so far don't seem to suggest Florida has much worse reporting than other states. Unless they are secretly burying dead people.
10: Why go there if you can experience shame.
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Biden's national polling lead at this point in the campaign cycle is larger than any enjoyed by Hillary Clinton in the last six months of the 2016 campaign. And Biden is leading in every public poll in June in key battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- all states that Trump won in 2016, giving him an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote.|>
7: Yeah. I'd add that it's shitty in the way that journalism is so often shitty: There's enough information to make the state department of health look bad, but you have to read it quite closely, and even then the scale of the deception isn't clear at all. Here's the Department of Health:
The department explained in a statement that the new reporting guidelines are necessary to get a more accurate count of patients receiving intensive care treatment with COVID-19 rather than simply patients in the ICU with the virus.
That's got to be bullshit, right? I mean, does anybody think that as much as, say, 10 percent of the population carries the virus asymptomatically? Is it really relevant to public health if your numbers of patients "receiving intensive care treatment with COVID-19" are off by a few percent?
And remember the purpose of this count: It's to determine whether the state has ICU capacity to handle a potential surge that could be caused by re-opening. There is no answer to Jones's assertion here (or at least, the newspaper doesn't report one):
"Their change in language and reporting doesn't affect how many beds are available."
14: It's not even that. At the absolute Billy Basic level, it's just they talked to her, and then they got a statement from the FDOH saying "She's wrong, because she's double-counting serological tests and swab tests of the same person" AND THEY DIDN'T THEN GO BACK TO HER FOR A RESPONSE. That's actually journalistic malpractice. If you're going to publish an allegation like that, you give the subject a chance to respond.
And they had her saying "there are counties where the published figures of total cases have actually gone down" - and just left it at that. They didn't ask for the names of the counties, or check it themselves. I mean, this is actually an easily verifiable fact. If she says the number of ICU beds is X and the state says Y, that's going to be hard to verify. But this is an assertion about publicly available data.
But the overall death rates for the state so far don't seem to suggest Florida has much worse reporting than other states. Unless they are secretly burying dead people.
I mean, median age in Florida is 42.2. Median age in Arizona and Texas is 37.9 and 34.8, respectively. I'd expect that to affect the death rates in Florida.
Which I suppose is would imply that Florida case numbers could be comparatively lower, not higher, so that really isn't a counterargument.
Counter-counterpoint: Florida has lots of loose sandy soil and murky water.
Anyway, my point was that the difference in overall death rates in 2020 compared to 2019 didn't seem that far off compared to other states.
15-16. Yeah, shoddy work. My only amendment would be to say that it's not unusually shoddy work.
I mean suppose that if, as a reporter, you get the numbers that demonstrate the state is lying. Then, in all fairness, you have to go back to the state and get their bullshit explanation, which will contain some technical obfuscations that you can either present as-is, or do the additional work to debunk.
At some point, you have to stop the back-and-forth between disputing parties and report what you've got. Best to just make a few phone calls, write a few e-mails, get responses, report the responses, and get on with your life.
That's a bit of sarcasm on my part, but to offer a little genuine sympathy for the journalist involved: Given deadline pressure, you've got to go with what you have in the moment. Crappy stories like this have to be viewed in the context of all of the outlet's reporting on the subject. With luck, that news outlet has the resources to follow up. If not, hopefully somebody else gets it done.
20: In that case, I would have expected Florida rates to change more than other states. Being on par does seem weird.
Record new cases today!
Previous record was March 26.
I feel like I'm watching the second round of Americans who are not me getting hit. First it was the coastal cities connected more directly to the rest of the world than my dissected plateau and now it's the vulnerable in states with a higher percentage of assholes.
In particular, a higher percentage of assholes holding positions of power.
Right. But we'd be just as bad as Arizona if it weren't for Philadelphia voters.
And that's where all the state's Covid cases are.
Excuse me? May I ask where you're finding states with either a higher percentage of assholes, or of assholes in power (Cuomo, DiBlasio), than NY? This level of disrespect has been noted, and if it continues action may be taken.
People are always really nice to me in New York.
Except the Olive Garden in the suburbs of Syracuse. They didn't bring salad or bread sticks for like 20 minutes. The entree came two seconds later.
13: President Dukakis and his 17-point July 1988 lead would like a word.
Oddly, the digitized text of that article ends with "DON'T BITE!!!" which doesn't appear in the scan of the printed version.
My graduate student who just got through his qualifying exam with flying colors is taking some time off (great!) and plans to go visit Disney World with his girlfriend (hmm.....).
Maybe it's like after the Super Bowl and they paid him to say "I'm going to Disney World."
And with perfect timing, I just stumbled across a story about a covid outbreak linked to a bar in Orlando (40 cases and counting).
A high school friend of mine went to Disney World for his honeymoon. They're still married after like 25 years, but I would have figured you couldn't recover after a start like that.
We hit a new high with 5,996 new cases today in Texas.
That's kind of why I feel this is just something I'm dodging by virtue of my location. Pennsylvania is 500 new cases today. Only 45 in the county, which is higher than the recent past, but still feels comfortably rare.
Only 81 new cases in our county today, which is much lower than the daily counts lately.
Your county is like 1/8th of ours in terms of population.
There are 1853 active cases in the county, and 1240 in our town, of ~60K.
Abbott said today that he's decided not to continue opening up the state, and we're going to stay where we are. I mean, it's been so successful, I think it's nice to just rest on our laurels for a beat. He also said that a few counties are going to pause on elective surgeries, so I think he's pinpointed the source of all these cases.
Part of our state increase is apparently people who've vacationed in Myrtle Beach, which is the sort of thing a large number of my high school classmates seem to be doing now. We've also gone from daily briefings from the governor (I never watched, but lots of people were super into them) to weekly ones. I'm not sure what that means in terms of news.
When I was in Ohio, a guy who worked on my floor called Myrtle Beach the "Redneck Riviera," but apparently that's not common. To be clear, he was recommending the place.
Blasphemy. The Redneck Riviera is the Florida panhandle beaches.
Selah as a little little one thought it was Murder Beach (and was angry I wouldn't take her.)
38: The PA weekly average hit a local minimum and has rebounded to where it was two weeks ago. Feels ominous, after declining for so long.
Redneck Riviera is the Pandhandle. On Kentuckians going to Myrtle Beach, It amuses me that people inland from the same area sort of all go to the same places on the coast--Pittsburgh tends to be more NC up to Delaware, eastern PA is Jersey. Hadn't occurred to me that it'd hold for points southwest, too.
That's what I meant by not common. It was stolen honors he was bestowing.
47: I am honestly shocked that someone hasn't used that excellent title for a slasher film yet.
I just think it's funny to call Moby and Thorn "southwest".
From Boston, everything is southwest, unless it's downeast.
51: I'm only calling Thorn southwest; quarantine has made it harder to recenter my globe. Honestly I think of her as downriver, but that isn't as useful for measuring distance from coast.
It's probably good for Florida, in the short term, that Arizona is going to be the poster child for Covid-related fucking up for a while.
Texas is ordering the bars to close again and restaurants back to 50 percent capacity.
You have until noon today to get your drunk on.
They don't even get a couple of hours to day drink first.
Holy shit. Florida had almost 9000 new cases yesterday. Almost double their previous high water mark.
In retrospect, that indoor rally for 3000 maskless people that the President held in Arizona three days ago seems like maybe it was a bad idea.
You love Pepsi cola and they love death.
You love Tab and they love moderately severe injuries.
You love Royal Crown and they love urinary tract infections.
You love LaCroix and they love poorly treated acne.
I didn't understand the assignment.
That's the one where the promoter walks into the audition?
That episode with all the wookie fucking is off the hook.
We got Disney so that somebody can see Hamilton, but I'm going to watch all of The Simpsons up to about season ten and all the Star Wars.