Seeing more press for Rebekah Jones now (fired FL data "scientist")
She’s the one who was fired for, in her terms, not manipulating Covid-19 test numbers for the state
Be careful and don’t blindly spread her info. She’s not doing anyone any favors for a couple of reasons
1) the original disagreement, from what I read, was over not using presumed positive cases. This isn’t the presumed positive from locally tested cases not yet confirmed by the CDC. This was just cases of symptoms which could be Covid, even if no test was taken. I take issue with that. While we may want to include those from an abundance of caution, testing is very easily obtained here in FL now. Using laboratory confirmed test results will be more reliable long-term
2) her new arcgis site shows higher daily totals than the FL Dept of Health site. One glaring reason: she includes antibody positive test results in that. That’s greatly disingenuous and distorts daily numbers by about 10%. Antibodies could be present for months. Someone going for an antibody test didn’t necessarily just contract the virus. These numbers should be kept separately, and on the FL DOH site they are. There’s a separate serology report available which details antibody tests
I’ve been culling data for days from the FL site (which publishes in a painful-to-use PDF which takes me a couple hours to update my separately-maintained spreadsheets I use for my trend analysis)
PDF: http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/action/report_archive/state/state_reports_latest.pdf
Therefore, I reconcile numbers with this site, too, esp because FL likes to keep non-residents from certain totals even tho they’re currently here and tested positive here (lot of vacation home owners here who spend extended periods of time here)
https://covidtracking.com/data/state/florida
You can see my latest analyses here:
Link to tweet
Link to tweet
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