The Tampa Bay Times reported that for 105 days in the worst of the pandemic, Florida’s COVID-19 death toll went missing. County death tolls were withheld from the public. Floridians had no idea how many of their neighbors were dying. This is part of Florida Governor Ron DeathSantis’ blue sky policy. If you hide the statistic from the public they can go about their lives in blissful ignorance.
The Florida Department of Health knows how many people are dying in each county, but stopped telling the public on June 4, 2021. That’s when state officials stopped releasing daily pandemic data, switched to weekly reports and started withholding data once available to the public.
The state directed the public to find that information via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But the CDC relied on Florida’s online portal of COVID data — which the state also took down in June 2021. The CDC’s tally of deaths for Florida went blank. The number of people dying in each Florida county went missing from June 4, 2021 through September 17, 2021. This episode that illustrates how governments continue to hinder the public’s understanding of the virus and its toll. What they don’t know can’t kill them, or can it?
The designer of the Florida COVID-19 dashboard, was fired when she refused to cushion the numbers. The dashboard was also scrapped just as the Delta variant began to kill Floridians in large numbers. Florida leaders spent years whittling down the Department of Health, leaving Florida with one of the lowest numbers of epidemiologists per residents in the country.
As of October 18, 2021, the Florida COVID-19 related deaths per 100,000 was 0.79 with an average of 170.3 Floridians dying every day from COVID-19. Only Texas has a higher death toll at an average of 197 people dying every day. Lets just sweep that under the rug.