From the start of the pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been committed to the idea of mushroom management — he’s kept Florida citizens in the dark and fed them bullshit. In April, Florida began hiding the list of deaths from county medical examiners, which had always been public before that point. In May, DeSantis fired data scientist Rebekah Jones after she refused to stop posting data that was both accurate and public. Jones created her own dashboard in June, in hopes of giving Florida residents a more accurate view of what was going on. However, since then the state has been making it harder to get basic information on topics like hospitalization rates, and persecuting Jones—ending with a raid on her home in which weapons were pointed at her children. In the wake of that raid, a Republican official resigned his position, saying he no longer wished to serve Florida’s current government in any capacity.
But even if Jones’ computers were carried away in this politically motivated raid, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel couldn’t help but notice another … oddity in Florida’s COVID-19 data. This particular strangeness was a sudden and unexplained gap in reporting of deaths related to COVID-19, one that began just days before the election.
The gap was actually noticed first by University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. On his personal website, Salemi posted the data, but drew no immediate conclusion, saying that he needed “to understand this process more.”
But what the Sun-Sentinel shows is that Florida announced that it was making a change in how it was handling “backlogged deaths” on Oct. 24, just 10 days before the election. These are deaths that had been recorded on previous dates, but not yet reported on the state’s official site. According to the state, it wanted to make sure that deaths logged to COVID-19 really were directly attributable to the disease, and couldn’t be assigned to some other cause. Florida officials didn’t resume reporting these deaths until Nov. 17, and when they did numbers were surprisingly down, even though case counts and hospitalizations were up. In addition, it seems that there was a very abrupt change that came a few days before these announcements.
So what were Florida voters seeing when they looked at COVID-19 deaths in the days leading up to the election? That things were great. On Oct. 7, there had been 119 deaths reported in a day. But after Oct. 20, the number of deaths reported in a day never reached double-digits until well after the election.
Here’s another astounding coincidence that was picked up by WTSP back in November: Starting on Oct. 22, just as the reported deaths from COVID-19 made this unexplained drop, DeSantis went dark on COVID-19 statements. Even though case counts were rising in the state all through this period, and COVID-19 was dominating the conversation in other states, DeSantis didn’t make a statement about the state of the pandemic. For two weeks, DeSantis had no briefings or news conferences about the pandemic, despite multiple requests for an update from both local officials and news organizations.
It seems that DeSantis contrived to make sure that when people went to the polls across his state, COVID-19 wasn’t on their minds. And if it was, they could be expected to be comforted by how the state was seeing a plummeting death toll even as the numbers were soaring across the nation. In short—Florida voters were sent a false message that the pandemic was under control in their state, and that the “open everything” policies advocated by DeSantis and Donald Trump had been successful.
