FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – An astonishing pattern has emerged in Florida’s COVID-19 death rate – a pattern that suggests the state has manipulated a backlog of unrecorded fatalities and is presenting more favorable death rates in the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
It’s how the state deals with the delay between the date someone dies and the date Florida reports that death in public counts. With minor exceptions, Florida stopped recording long-overdue deaths in its daily count on October 24, 10 days before the November 3 election, and consistently resumed recording on November 17, two weeks after the election.
The result: The daily deaths that Floridians saw at the time were significantly lower than they otherwise would have been.
The change came just three days after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced it would conduct an additional evaluation of any suspected COVID-19 death before adding it to the Florida census.
The data was analyzed by Professor Jason Salemi of the University of South Florida. He said he was surprised by the gap in election coverage, but did not draw any conclusions, noting that Florida’s death report is “still a bit of a black box” and wanted to “better understand this process.”
The Sun Sentinel in South Florida began asking multiple state officials last week to discuss these surprising data patterns. No one would answer questions. Jason Mahon, Florida Department of Health spokesman, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The intention of the state in manipulating the data thus remains unclear. It is possible that the Florida Department of Health has paused reporting of overdue deaths as part of its new policy to review them. Whatever the intent, the change led to more favorable mortality trends as the election approached.
The state’s reluctance to answer questions about its COVID-19 data is not uncommon. During the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis and his administration have followed a pattern of secrecy and spin, underestimating the spread of the pandemic in its earliest days and instructing public health officials not to make public statements about COVID-19 as elections approached, a Sun Sentinel study said. found it.
Analysts following Florida’s numbers say they are perplexed at the state’s pause in reporting month-old deaths. They said they too had asked the state for clarification but received no response.
“It’s hard to know if there was a constraint around election time or if random other things were happening,” said Scott David Herr, a Florida computer scientist who keeps track of COVID-19 daily data. The Ministry of Health has not explained why the delays are inconsistent. If they keep changing what’s going on behind the scenes, if the delays keep changing, then it gets confusing. “
While public health experts say pandemic deaths are typically underreported, Republicans have complained that Florida deaths were exaggerated, with fatalities from other causes in the totals. DeSantis has speculated that his own health department’s death rates were too high.
The DeSantis administration changed the requirements for reporting deaths from the pandemic, first because it was concerned about the growing backlog and when it began to question the validity of the rising Florida death toll:
August 15: While the county’s medical examiners were initially responsible for deciding whether deaths were caused by COVID-19, they became inundated with cases and fell behind. At their request, the state allowed the treating physicians to make those decisions and report them directly to the state.
Oct. 13: House Speaker José Oliva, a Republican from Miami Lakes, attacked COVID-19 death reports arriving in the health department as “often lacking in rigor” and undermining “the completeness and reliability of the death records.
Oct. 21: Florida Surgeon General Dr. Scott Rivkees announces that the state will impose a new rating layer on deaths before totals are released, saying many deaths occurred more than a month before they were reported or months after the person tested positive for COVID-19. “To ensure the accuracy of COVID-19-related deaths, the department will conduct additional assessments of all deaths. Timely and accurate data remains a top priority of the Ministry of Health. “
Within days, things changed. A key category disappeared from the state’s daily figures: deaths that occurred more than a month earlier. Such deaths have long been an important part of the daily totals in Florida and other states, because physician death reports don’t always hit the health department immediately, but instead roll in within days and weeks.
The impact of that change was enormous. Consider: In the month leading up to the change, from September 23 to October 20, the state included in its daily count 1,128 deaths that occurred at least a month earlier – accounting for 44% of the deaths announced at the time. But in the week before the election, the health department included just one of those deaths in its daily figures.
Had Florida finally caught up? That was not the case: On November 17, two weeks after the election, the daily death toll in Florida began again to consistently include deaths that had occurred more than a month earlier, and a large number of deaths that had occurred more than two months earlier , according to Salemi’s analysis.
A striking and mysterious resumption of overdue death reporting came on Sunday, Nov. 8. On that day, the state recorded the smallest number of reported new deaths in a few months, just 15. And that day’s count included the greatest percentage of overdue deaths of any day – a whopping 74% of the deaths reported that day were more than a month old. But because so few recent deaths were recorded, the total count for November 8 seemed similar to the daily counts reported for the days before and after.
The public did not see the actual data of the deaths in that count. What the public saw: a number of deaths that declined in the days leading up to the election, and slowly rose in the days that followed.
The Florida Department of Health has refused to release COVID-19 death certificates to scientists or journalists for review. Until late summer, the files were released to the public in summary form by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which collects death certificates from the medical examiner’s offices during the state of emergency. But in August, when COVID-19 deaths were no longer guided by the county’s medical investigators, the information was no longer made public.
Salemi said he thought the gap in the primaries may have been due to the change that removed the responsibility of medical researchers, whose overworked staff were responsible for much of the backlog. Or maybe it came as a result of the new health ministry policy to pay more attention to each case.
But then, in mid-November, the dozens of overdue deaths reappeared in the state’s daily counts.
“I’m starting to wonder what’s going on,” he said.
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(Staff writer Adelaide Chen contributed to this report.)