The audit of Florida COVID-19 cases and deaths ought to enrage every Floridian who has lost a loved one to the pandemic.
The deep dive into the state’s COVID response confirms what medical experts, data journalists, a Department of Health whistle-blower and others who cared long suspected: Undercounts of cases and deaths, inaccuracies, incomplete and delayed reporting — and no competent effort at contact tracing at the onset of the pandemic when we all were so vulnerable.
Those are the findings of a Florida auditor general state report released Monday.
It’s documented proof that science-denying Gov. Ron DeSantis — who placed himself at the forefront of the state’s COVID response, rarely sharing the stage with credible medical experts — didn’t give a damn.
Not as long as he could use the pandemic to make a name for himself, politicizing the deadly virus and dividing Floridians while COVID didn’t distinguish between political parties or care about culture wars.
What the coronavirus did during its first year, however, was disproportionately wreak havoc on minority communities from where many of the workers deemed “essential” in the service, labor and retail industries come from.
That, too, is now documented in a recent study led by a University of South Florida epidemiologist. It concluded the death rates among those employees were five times higher than for the rest of the population.
Lives taken
They died because they didn’t have the luxury to work from home.
They died serving the rest of us.
People like the Nicaraguan son in Miami, whom I wrote about. He cleaned floors at Mount Sinai Medical Center, contracted the disease and, not knowing it, infected his entire family. He and his parents died; only his sister, also infected, survived.
The lives COVID took in Florida — a reported 74,715 to date — deserved better from the governor, who did everything possible to downplay the seriousness of the disease.
There was, from the beginning, a tremendous lack of transparency from the Department of Health.
At one point in 2021, the Miami Herald reported, DeSantis’ administration changed data, manipulating dates to create a non-existent decline in deaths when the opposite was happening. The Department of Health denied it, as a spokesman is doing now with the inspector general’s report.
What else can you do when you work for a governor who has appointed a discredited surgeon general who still doesn’t believe in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to mask up and vaccinate?
Floridians who died from COVID also deserved better from the spineless people, with two notable exceptions, who worked and still work at the Department of Health, knew what was going on, but didn’t speak up.
There should’ve been many others like whistle-blower Rebekah Jones, who created the DOH data dashboard and alerted Floridians to the mishandling of COVID numbers, and Dr. Raul Pino, the department’s health director in Orange County, wrongly accused of pressuring employees to get vaccinated.
Both were fired for trying to save lives, and Jones was ordered arrested by DeSantis. An internal inspector general’s report conducted by her former agency and released in May rejected her claim that the state intentionally falsified COVID case data as DeSantis was attempting to reopen the state. There was insufficient available evidence to prove it, the report said.
Scary state we live in. No state tax, but politics rules over science, even during a still-ongoing worldwide pandemic. If you try to do the right thing, you lose your job or are threatened with fines, as DeSantis did with school district administrators who insisted children wear masks upon their return to school.
Inaccurate, incomplete, delayed
How badly did DeSantis botch it?
The state’s response, the Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau reports, “was so inaccurate, incomplete and delayed during the first months of the pandemic that government officials and the public may not have had necessary information to determine the effectiveness of the state’s COVID-19 precautions and the best plan to fight the virus.”
This sums up well what Florida’s medical experts — doctors, nurses, epidemiologists and contagious disease front-line workers — have been telling us off the record for the past two years. All of them have been too concerned with DeSantis’ ability to abuse power and get away with it to go on the record. No one wants their institution punished and funding from the state withdrawn.
That’s why the inspector general’s audit is a welcome addition to the truth.
The undeniable reality is this: DeSantis could have saved lives had he taken COVID seriously. But he didn’t. It’s that simple.
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