Voters that can't vote, and now COVID deaths that really didn't happen. Oh Florida. Oh, the humanity.
We have become used to the state of Florida playing games with their elections to help the repubs. We have become used to games being played with the state health department that undercount the number of cases and fatalities. But now, it looks like the DeSantis administration has decided that the numbers aren’t really that bad after all, and they will reexamine the way these statistics are calculated, and maybe they won’t even need to be reported everyday.
I’ve been following the Florida numbers as of late, since there is a tremendous upsurge in the numbers in the wake of the governor removing all anti-covid restrictions. I looked for today’s numbers and saw nothing posted for Florida. That happened once recently, but it turned out to be a glitch in the state system, and was remedied. I see yet another day with no numbers, so I do a search of news for today, and find this article from the Orlando Sentinel.
It appears the administration had decided that some of these deaths that are reported may have had a lag of week or more. So by all means, if they can’t get it perfect, let’s not report it at all. From the article:
Reported deaths often come weeks, and sometimes more than a month, after the actual day of death, though, but on Wednesday, Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Scott A. Rivkees, said the DOH will begin reviewing all fatalities reported to the state more thoroughly.
“During a pandemic, the public must be able to rely on accurate public health data to make informed decisions," Rivkees said in the press release. "To ensure the accuracy of COVID-19 related deaths, the department will be performing additional reviews of all deaths. Timely and accurate data remains a top priority of the Department of Health.”
The governor, according to the piece, has been “angling” to get away from daily reports. Yeah, why panic people. Let’s do it every two weeks so the next report will come down after the election. I don’t suppose it has occurred to the Dear Leader of the state of Florida that there is nothing stopping the hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices from pooling their information and releasing it outside of state channels. There is nothing also, stopping free counties from releasing their own stats, independent of the state.
This reminds me so much of the old Soviet Union. But instead of bragging about record harvests, in the middle of actual famine, DeSantis seeks to brag about a low COVID rate in the midst of a pandemic.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with trying to gaslight the voters of Florida into thinking that repubs are doing a wonderful job handling the pandemic.
Addendum:
This diary is about to disappear from recent list, but I see it’s still trending. I don’t know if anyone will see this, since this diary is late in its active life. I have an update from the Orlando Sentinel. The powers that be did indeed update this site, but not until late Wednesday night. It turns out that the administration decided that the 95 deaths that were listed can’t possible be right, censored the medical people on this until they could verify the deaths were truly of covid. Apparently, there was suspicions that numbers might not be legit. Crisis actors? Deep State? Comet Pizza? Here is the updated from the Orlando Sentinel.
This diary is probably going to go off the edge of the world early this morning unless my update causes the admins to put it back earlier in the queue. If nobody posts on this tomorrow, I’ll publish another diary focusing on the updated info. This is too important to be just a story local to Florida.
