Give Florida and Ron DeSantis credit where it’s due

Jones’s account is suspect for multiple reasons, the most important being that it lacks corroboration and withholds important context. In fact, DeSantis spokeswoman Helen Aguirre Ferre said that Jones’s ousting had nothing to do with the actual data and everything to do with Jones’s “insubordination” and refusal to work with “input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

An email that Jones sent to her supervisor before she was fired shows that Ferre might have a point. Shortly after her access to the data dashboard was removed, Jones sent an email to subscribers of a COVID-19 data Listserv, warning them not to expect “accessibility and transparency” from her replacement. When confronted about this comment, which clearly undermined the department’s work, Jones apologized.

“What I meant when I said I don’t expect the same level of accessibility is that they are busy and can’t answer every single email they get right away,” Jones wrote to her supervisor, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “Is this one of those stupid things I shouldn’t have said?”

Put aside the workplace drama, and Jones’s story has another glaring problem. The crux of her complaint is that health officials allegedly asked her to remove data that included reports from Florida residents who allegedly exhibited coronavirus symptoms well before the outbreak began. The reason for this request is self-explanatory: Such data simply is not reliable, since it has not yet been supported by antibody testing. Just because a person reports COVID-19 symptoms does not mean that they actually had COVID-19, and including those reports in the state’s database would make the data more unreliable.

What’s more, health officials did not remove this data permanently, as Jones has suggested. One glance at the correspondence between Jones and other health officials suggests that what actually occurred was a simple fact-check, and an effort to make sure all of the published information was reliable and accurate.

“Per Dr. Blackmore, disable the ability to export the data to files from the dashboard immediately. We need to ensure that dates (date fields) in all objects match their counterpart on the PDF line list published,” Department of Health Information Technology Director Craig Curry wrote in an email to Jones.

Because the PDF mentioned did not include a column of data showing when symptoms were first reported, Jones advised Curry against disabling the files: “This is the wrong call.” But she took that particular case line down anyways, and just one hour later, was given the green light to put the case line data back on the dashboard.

There is nothing unusual about this exchange. Curry asked to disable a certain line of data temporarily to make sure that it was accurate. And the data was made public once again shortly thereafter. Unless there’s more to this story, this is a nonissue. So why is the media suggesting otherwise?

DeSantis also has been accused of censoring coronavirus data because the state has refused to reveal the names of COVID-19 victims and patients. This decision is certainly worth criticism, since identifying current and past coronavirus cases would help health officials track the spread of COVID-19 and contain its hot spots. Florida’s public record laws also require officials to disclose this information.

But DeSantis’s decision to withhold the identities of coronavirus patients does not, in any way, affect the overall numbers. Each case is still reported and logged into the system, regardless of whether the patient’s name is included.

A valid concern raised by critics, however, is the inconsistency between the Florida Department of Health’s numbers and numbers from individual medical examiners. But again, a lot of this is based on hearsay and witness testimony rather than on actual evidence. But such an inconsistency would not be surprising: Multiple states are experiencing a similar problem as they try to collect and make sense of data from individual counties. So this is not a unique problem, but it is one that should be rectified, in Florida and elsewhere.

For his part, DeSantis has denied these allegations, accusing critics of latching onto them in an attempt to discredit his government’s successful response. And his frustration is warranted: Many in the media (myself included) criticized DeSantis in the early days of the pandemic for refusing to implement statewide restrictions. We warned that Florida could become the next New York if DeSantis did not act.

But the disaster we anticipated never struck, in part because DeSantis’s targeted, localized approach better prepared Florida’s counties for the outbreak. And unlike a few of his fellow governors, he helped protect his state’s elderly population by shutting down nursing homes early on and preventing hospitals from sending COVID-19 patients back to long-term care facilities.

DeSantis reminded the media of their failed predictions in a well-deserved rant on Wednesday:

DeSantis’s response hasn’t been perfect. Florida’s nursing homes are still experiencing a devastating number of deaths, and health officials are way behind on mass viral testing. But we should be willing to give DeSantis the credit he’s due. Instead, many in the media are attributing Florida’s declining positive cases and deaths to malpractice and corruption.

This criticism is unfair and, in most cases, outright dishonest. And, unsurprisingly, it’s coming from the same people who were wrong about DeSantis’s response in the first place.