Florida Blames Rise in Case Tally on Dump of Months-Old Data

(Bloomberg) -- Florida’s Department of Health warned that a dump of months-old Covid-19 data had severely skewed the latest daily report, making it appear worse than it was.

The disclosure sheds new light on a report that, on its surface, seemed to suggest a stalling of the recent downward trend in coronavirus cases and positivity rates in hard-hit Florida. It had an especially outsize impact on statistics for Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest county.

The state reported a 1.5% increase in cases on Wednesday, sending the total to 550,901. The rise was greater than the past week’s 1.3% average, and the rate of people testing positive for the first time hit 11.9%, the highest since July 29.

The state said Niznik Lab Corp. just disclosed thousands of cases dating back seven weeks. Indeed, the state’s archive of reports showed Niznik results never appeared in Florida’s data until Wednesday, when it debuted with 4,422 positive tests at a 31% positivity rate.

Test results don’t necessarily equate to new cases because people can be tested more than once. But the Niznik positive tests compared to 8,109 new cases reported on Wednesday. The results probably also had an impact on the closely watched positivity-rate data, which appeared to show a greater percentage of overall tests coming back positive.

Niznik said in an emailed statement that while patients got results within 24 and 36 hours of being tested, reporting to the state has been more complicated, causing the delay.

“There has been data integration issues that both parties have worked on and have been resolved which led to the reporting of all positive tests from June 23 to August 5 at one time,” Niznik said.

Governor Ron DeSantis has often blamed spikes in cases on so-called data dumps. Last week, he said some “smaller, private labs” don’t report negative results and that had caused him to lose faith in the positivity-rate metric.

Even without Wednesday’s data blip, the positivity rate has remained stubbornly high, prompting many to question DeSantis’s push to reopen schools. To be sure, Florida’s cumulative positivity rate appears broadly similar even excluding the smaller labs. Five large labs account for about half of all tests in Florida.

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