Florida Department Of Health Is Caught Majorly Over-Reporting Positive Coronavirus Cases

The Florida Department of Health was just caught massively over-reporting the number of positive COVID-19 cases in the state.

This was discovered by news station WOFL, which reported that the Florida Department of Health (FDH) has said that “countless” COVID-19 testing sites across the state have reported a near 100% positivity rate, which would mean that every single person tested was positive. The FDH had also claimed that other labs had extremely high positivity rates as well.

When reporters for the news affiliates contacted these testing sites, however, they learned that these figures were not accurate at all. While the FDH claimed that Orlando Health had a 98% COVID-19 positivity rate, officials at the hospital said that they had a positivity rate of just 9.4%. The state also claimed that Orlando VA Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76%; however, officials there said their positivity rate was only 6%.

The FDH placed the blame for these mistakes on the laboratories themselves, accusing them of not immediately reporting testing results.

“The Department immediately began working with those labs to ensure that all results were being reported in order to provide comprehensive and transparent data,” an FDH spokesman said. “As the state continues to receive results from various labs, the Department will continue educating these labs on proper protocol for reporting COVID-19 test results.”

This comes as the mainstream media has been focusing on Florida quite a bit, gleefully trying to claim that there is a spike in COVID-19 cases there. Like much of what the rest of the media report these days, however, this has turned out to be fake news.

This comes after Dr. Charles Lockwood, dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine, downplayed the apparent spike in Florida coronavirus cases.

“We are picking up asymptomatic cases, [and] picking up milder cases than we did before,” Lockwood told Fox News. “When you test this number of people, thousands and thousands — really, if you think about it, we are approaching one percent of the population in Florida being tested every day.”

This piece was written by PoliZette Staff on July 15, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.