Over the weekend, Florida made international headlines when it reported a shocking number of positive COVID-19 test results: More than 15,000 in a single day.
But it turns out that report contained numbers gathered over several days by a single laboratory.
More than 7,000 of the 15,000 positive cases reported have been traced to GENETWORx in Richmond, Virginia. The company, which is Florida’s fourth-largest processor of tests, said in a statement it looks like the Florida Department of Health reported in a single day, lab results that had been collected over the course of four to five days.
Florida’s recent record day for COVID-19 might not have been quite that high
When almost half the reported number has been wrongly logged, that is either malpractice or politics. And the way the Media and the Democrats have been pounding on DeSantis and Florida in general, I cannot discard outright conspiracy.
But wait, it gets worse.
Another issue which could challenge people’s trust in the test figures is the Florida Department of Health website section, which appears to show several labs only passing along positive results. The negative column is blank, making it appear that nearly 100 percent of the tests those labs performed came back positive.
Orlando Health, for example, reported 512 positive cases and just 10 negatives giving the appearance of a 98 percent positive test rate.
Reader Roger C. had sent me the COVID-19: summary of persons being monitored, persons tested, and cases report yesterday (thanks!) and it is just more than one lab and it is mind numbing that nobody caught the obvious mistakes before.
The “testing by laboratory” begins in page 21 of the report and it looks like this:
COVID 19 summary of persons being monitored persons tested july 14 
Notice how it flows from 3% to 17% and that would be according to where the tests have come from: less populated counties versus very populated ones. In fact there are some that break the 20% mark and by their location it looks they get samples from Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
But then you get numbers like this:
And that is not all the labs with funky results. I just stopped because the pic was getting too big. The variation of percentages go from 3% to 20+% and we know Miami Dade has the higher one at around 22-23%. But we have labs spitting results in the 40% and up all the way to 100%. You cannot get 100% even on dead people who allegedly died of the Kung-Flu.
So what is going on? Again we must debate if it is just a clerical fuck up or done with political intent.
One lab with a bad entry is an accident. More than 25 labs?
never trust any government numbers. It’s government. Need I say more?
If you look at the state’s stats page (you probably have it bookmarked, but here) you’ll see that it looks like they regularly dump a bunch of tests on one day or a couple of days. I mean, all data has noise in it, but the day to day variation just feels too big. In our county, they’ll went from 146 to 250 and down to 86 the next day. I think it’s the labs not updating continuously.
My gripe is that they always present the number of cases all time. There’s no effort to show current cases. In my county there have been 3,704 cases, and there’s no indication of how many got over it, or never really had symptoms, just the total that have died and been hospitalized since they started tracking. It would be more valuable to know how many people have it now so you know the percentage of people that have it and the rough odds of crossing paths with them.
More importantly than just cases, how many of those are hospitalizations? If you’re getting genuine positives from people who have no symptoms (and thus unlikely to even spread it), then who the hell cares? Did anyone care when you or I were sick with a cold if it didn’t require medical intervention?
They keep going on about how many positives there are, but their deaths are still very low, much lower than the Northeastern states that sacrificed all their nursing home residents.