COVID Tracking - Are Some States Manipulating The Numbers? What About Florida?
Florida testing has gone down dramatically simply its summer surge and now it has among the lowest testing rates per 1000 people in the entire nation with just 1 test per 1000 people. Thus, in Trump like fashion, the number of reported cases is going down, which the Governors then cites as a basis for again rapidly reopening.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/tracker/overview
Of course, if you test less, this might cause a spike in positivity rates, which the John Hopkins site reports as 10.7 percent and rising. Cause for alarm?
Well, Florida again messes with the numbers by counting negative retests, but excluding positive retests in order to reduce the positivity rate to a still concerning 5 percent.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/09/26/florida-adds-2795-coronavirus-cases-107-deaths/
What is almost criminal about this is that Florida already got burned once when it tried to explain away or hide COVID-19 numbers, which eventually lead to a surge of seriously ill people. Yet, here we are again with Florida accelerating the pace of reopening even as positivity rates creep up even under Florida's weird methodology that ignores positive retests, but counts negative retests.