Legislators to DeSantis: Be fully transparent with COVID-19 data, ‘Floridians can handle it’
Florida’s lawmakers and elder-care advocates on Friday urged Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Department of Health to refrain from withholding details about the spread of the novel coronavirus and allow the public to better evaluate the risk of being exposed to the infection as the state continues to reopen.
“Floridians can handle the good and the bad data and we need to push out all the data so people can make decisions on their individual health,’’ said Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Republican from St. Petersburg who chairs a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on criminal justice. He said he does not have any independent knowledge that the state is not being forthcoming but said he believes: “You have a duty to be transparent and if you’re going to open, at least be incredibly honest and transparent with the best data that you have.”
Dave Bruns, a spokesman for AARP, which has called on state health officials to be more forthcoming in revealing real-time details about the spread of the coronavirus in long-term care facilities, also urged the state to change its ways.
“Florida is in the midst of one of its greatest public health crises in a century. The state is deploying very significant public resources — the taxpayer’s resources — to address this crisis,” he said.
“It is indisputable that older Floridians have the right to review the data on this crisis, as much detail as possible, both to protect their loved ones and themselves, and also to hold accountable public officials who are charged with protecting our health and safety. AARP Florida would like to have additional detail, in as close to real time as possible, about the results of widespread, frequent testing in elder-care facilities, which are Ground Zero in this emergency.”
The comments came after the Miami Herald analyzed both public and non-public data relating to the spread of the novel coronavirus in Florida and found that the data the governor were using in his public pronouncements were sometimes in conflict with real-time facts regarding community spread, regional outbreaks and death tolls.
News organizations had to enlist lawyers to force the state to release data on COVID-19 testing and deaths for individual nursing homes and assisted living facilities and, although the information was eventually turned over, the Department of Health has refused to answer detailed questions about the data and why so many homes have reported no testing of residents and staff.
Brandes, who said he had not read the Herald series, said he believes the state “should be fully transparent” with all its health data. He said that just as legislators are planning to do an investigation into the botched unemployment compensation system that has left thousands of eligible Floridians without checks, “we should do a full review of the collection mechanism and data provided by the health information system.”
“Florida has nothing to hide,’’ he said. “The numbers are the numbers and we have a responsibility and, frankly, a legal obligation to tell the truth.”
Possible coronavirus cases were monitored by the state as early as January, but hospitals and the public were not made aware until March, the data reviewed by the Herald showed, and while cases initially spiked, social distancing practices led to a “flattening of the curve” in April. Since the state reopened non-essential businesses, though, confirmed cases have started rising again, including record tallies on Thursday and again on Friday.
Health officials reported that at least 170 COVID-19 patients reported symptoms between December and February, as the governor claimed there was no community spread, the Herald learned. And in April, as the governor was being encouraged by President Donald Trump and business leaders to reopen the state, DeSantis portrayed the data as showing the viral infections were going down in Florida. In fact, non-public DOH data for Florida, excluding Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, showed “positivity” — the percentage of COVID tests that came up positive — saw a sustained increase of four days.
Sen. Annette Taddeo, a Miami Democrat, said it is a mistake for the state to withhold some data because it makes what it does release unreliable.
As a small business owner, she said she needs to evaluate the risk of exposure and her liability as an employer before she can decide whether to bring her workers back to the office.
“When you try to hide things, there’s no trust in government,’’ she said. “If the information is not all out there in a state where it says in our constitution we’re a Sunshine State and we’re not supposed to hide things, it makes it very difficult. We should be following the New Zealand model, not the Venezuela or Cuba model.”
Rep. Evan Jenne, a Hollywood Democrat, said anything but transparency is short-sighted. “People are going to go about their lives as they see fit, trying to make an educated decision about their risk based on the best information they can get,’’ he said. “If the state is withholding that data, no one can say they are making an educated decision.”
DeSantis has defended the state’s data as transparent, saying that “any insinuating otherwise is just typical partisan narrative.”
At a news conference in Miami on Friday, DeSantis was asked if he opened the state too soon. He attributed a rise in positivity rates in several rural counties to “agriculture outbreaks, or prisons,” suggesting that if those large testing batches were removed the percentage of people testing positive would decline.
However, the Herald’s analysis removed batches of more than 20 tests from a single location in a single day and found that positivity was sometimes even higher after the batches were removed.
DeSantis said DOH has sent officials into areas with many farm workers to “test, test, test.” He also said the state was “now almost finished testing all staff and residents of long-term care facilities.”
Attempts by the news media to get state health officials to be forthcoming about where and when they have conducted tests have been met with silence. The state has said it has a policy to trace and isolate people who test positive for the virus, but it hasn’t explained in detail what it is.
Initially, DOH began calculating the positivity rate by dividing positive tests on a given day by total test results on the same day. But on April 25 — four days before the governor announced that 64 of 67 counties would relax social distancing requirements and reopen, the agency began dividing the number of first-time positive individuals by total tests. That change would lead to a lowering of the positivity rate, which was pointed to as justification for reopening.
This week, as the positivity rate continued to rise, the governor was asked if he opened the state too soon. He answered by shifting his focus from positivity to talking about the decline in hospitalizations. He argued that because the state is testing more people than it did in March, there are more people testing positive who have no symptoms.
“The good thing about that is these are people in low-risk groups.,’’ DeSantis told reporters. “So you have almost none of them end up hospitalized.”
He said that since Memorial Day weekend COVID-19 hospitalizations are down 13% in Miami-Dade County and, in Duval County, which this week agreed to host the Republican National Convention, COVID-19 hospitalizations are down 50 percent.
But public health experts cautioned that it may be too early to use hospitalization data as a reliable measure of symptomatic infection.
Jay Butler, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s deputy director of infectious disease and COVID-19 response incident manager, said the CDC continues to study the disease and how asymptomatic persons contribute to the spread.
“We know that some people don’t develop symptoms. We know that of those who develop symptoms, not everyone will be tested. So we have some other ways to look at metrics of severity: hospital admissions. Is ICU use increasing?’’ he said. But as the number of cases have been rising, “we’re not confirming a dramatic increase in the number of hospitalizations.”
He added: “This is something that’s ongoing and we will continue to monitor very closely.”
This story has been updated June 14 to clarify that Sen. Brandes had not read the Miami Herald series before he made his comments.
Miami Herald staff writers Daniel Chang and Ben Conarck contributed to this report.
Mary Ellen Klas can be reached at meklas@miamiherald.com and @MaryEllenKlas
This story was originally published June 12, 2020 at 8:43 PM.
