A report from the Florida Auditor General found that the state undercounted the number of Covid cases and deaths; failed to collect results of hundreds of thousands of tests; and underreported racial and ethnic impacts of the pandemic, the Miami Herald reports.
The year-long study of data from the early months of the pandemic shows that there was carelessness, wastefulness and wanton disregard for getting correct and distributing information. The Auditor General found that several senior state officials did not do their jobs properly for not confirming the data the state government was distributing.
The report also cited the state for failure to conduct any contact tracing of people who had tested positive for the coronavirus, self-defeating a process that could have helped limit the early spread of the virus.
Florida Man and Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has increasingly attempted to block public access to accurate data. A former state employee who worked in health data analysis publicly made claims that the state was cherry-picking data; her home was later rated by Florida police officers.
DeSantis also ordered the state to change the way it was reporting cases and deaths, back-filling data based on the dates of the event, versus the date it was reported to the state, which means daily tallies were artificially low and incomplete.