Who's Faking The Covid Case Count In Florida?
Fox 35 in Orlando took a look at the reporting of Covid cases in Florida and saw something fishy:
Countless labs have reported a 100 percent positivity rate, which means every single person tested was positive. Other labs had very high positivity rates. FOX 35 found that testing sites like Centra Care reported that 83 people were tested and all tested positive. Then, NCF Diagnostics in Alachua reported 88 percent of tests were positive.
How could that be? FOX 35 News investigated these astronomical numbers, contacting every local location mentioned in the report.
Well, I'm pretty sure the number of labs wasn't "countless"--it had to have been some finite number of labs, since Fox contacted all of them. Nevertheless ...
Numbers like that are inherently unbelievable--quite literally--since typical rates nationwide are a small fraction of that. More specifically, if the overall positive rate in Florida was running at 11% , what could possibly be up with "countless" labs running at 100% positivity?
So Fox contacted these places. Only a few got back to them--what a surprise, eh?
The report showed that Orlando Health had a 98 percent positivity rate. However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health's positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report.
The report also showed that the Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76 percent. A spokesperson for the VA told FOX 35 News on Tuesday that this does not reflect their numbers and that the positivity rate for the center is actually 6 percent.
FOX 35 News has yet to hear from the other labs or the Florida Department of Health to explain how the error could have been made on an official report.
Clerical errors at one or two labs I guess I can understand, but at "countless" labs? My initial suspicion would be that someone at the Florida Department of Health jiggered with the numbers. It should be possible to narrow that down.