DeSantis blames ‘data dump’ for virus case spike
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday warned against being swayed by “stale” data from the Department of Health on a day that Miami-Dade County reported a massive jump in reported coronavirus cases.
He said a “data dump” from a new lab was responsible for the spike and that he was going to “fix” that with the department but did not elaborate on what that meant.
Miami-Dade reported 4,141 positive COVID-19 cases on Wednesday. Its previous highest recent daily tally was 3,576 on July 12 and the county had not reported more than 2,000 daily cases since Aug. 1.
“Was this a sudden surge in new infections? No. As it turns out it was a data dump from a new private lab that included results from as far back as June. The data was stale. It was not indicative of current trends much less a quote record day of fresh infections in Miami,” DeSantis said during an address about the pandemic from the state Capitol. “Stale test results shouldn’t be used by policy makers to determine the way forward for students, parents, workers and businesses in the here and now.”
“The point of collecting data should be to illuminate, not obscure the actual facts on the ground and I expect that to be fixed very shortly,” he said.
What exactly DeSantis ordered the Department of Health to do to combat that sort of data update was unclear. The governor’s press office did not respond to a request for further information.
The state logged 8,109 cases to push the overall total to date to 550,901, or more than one in 40 people in the state of 21.5 million.
That is 18 days of case numbers of less than 10,000, but the 8,109 marks the highest daily tally in August so far. The Wednesday update also noted a positivity infection rate that had crept back up from recent lows to 11.89% among new infections.
Deaths also continue to pile up, a result of massive spread in June and early July. The latest report added another 212 fatalities among Florida residents to the state death toll rose to 8,765.