Virus tolls similar despite governors' contrasting actions

One possibility: that Florida's numbers just aren't accurate. From a new article just published this weekend:

It was April 2020 when Rebekah Jones says they first asked her to change the numbers. Then a 30-year-old scientist at the Florida Department of Health (DOH), she'd spent nearly two months building the platform that the state was using to provide daily updates to the press and public on COVID-19, including number of tests, confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Jones was so proud of the dashboard — which included six maps and covered half a million lines of data — that she monitored it for up to 16 hours a day. But now, a top state official was telling her to change the test positivity rate of certain counties to align with the state's maximum threshold for reopening, according to Jones... "There were counties that had, like, 18 or 20 percent positivity," Jones recalls. "And she was like, 'Well, just change it to 10....'"

At first, she says, she laughed out loud: "I thought it was a joke.... I was fired for refusing to manipulate data to drum up support for the governor's plan to reopen..."

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a35714647/rebekah-jone...