Proof Using His Own Numbers that DeSantis Lied about Florida Having Lowest Rates

 

A recent statement in the Washington Post (may be paywalled) by Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis caught my eye.  He said:

We’ve seen huge declines. Right now, Florida has the lowest covid-infection rate — case rate and infection rate of covidestim — in the country.

I had no idea what "covidestim" was, but thankfully WaPo linked it. Turns out it is a project by Yale, Harvard, and Stanford medical schools to model pandemic numbers in the states. 

They try to estimate the likely number of actual infections, etc., based on reported data. The raw data don't tell the whole story because (for example) some people get COVID-19 and don't know it or report it, meaning the reported cases underestimate the true numbers. The researchers do complicated statistical modeling to estimate the true numbers.

I did not know about this project and website, so I suppose I need to thanks DeSantis for bringing it to my attention. If only he hadn't done that in the process of lying about his state's standing.

On one hand, it's not super clear from his statement what he was claiming to be lowest on.  On the other hand, it doesn't matter because Florida isn't lowest on anything.

It's never a good idea to take a politician's words at face value (especially DeSantis). So I downloaded the data and checked Florida's rank on October 28, the day DeSantis made his statement. 

Unfortunately covidestim doesn't provide any formal definitions of the columns in the spreadhsheet. It's not clear from the column labels what some metrics measure, so I excluded those. It also looked like (and I confirmed this with one of the study's investigators) that most of the numbers in the spreadsheet aren't normalized by population, so I normalized them in terms of numbers per 100K population for each state using Census Bureau population estimates.

Here's is how Florida ranks among 50 states and the District of Columbia on October 28: 

Florida is not lowest on any of the measures. It's close to lowest on cases-fitted, which I take to be cases predicted by covidestim models (as opposed to cases reported). Here it is badly beaten by New Hampshire, which has nearly half as many cases (4.92 per 100K) as Florida (8.29 per 100K). 

Florida is low on diagnoses, infections, Rt (average number of new cases generated by an existing cases), and two symptomatic illness measures, but there are other states ahead of it in all cases. Notably Florida is in or close to the bottom third of states on the death measures.

So in fact  Florida is not lowest on anything on the day DeSantis said it was, and his COVIDiot policies are killing lots of his constituents. It's hard to understand how a governor can make such a statement, which is so easily proven wrong with a simple fact check.

This is a great example of how cynical and shameless politics has become these days. It doesn't matter what the facts say or the data show. You just claim anything you want that makes you look good. By the time someone like me catches you lying your message has gotten around and has done its job.

Image by covidestim