The Florida Department of Health accused the CDC on Friday (March 25) of wrongly deleting roughly 20,000 Florida deaths from its nationwide COVID-19 Data Tracker.
The CDC removed 72,277 deaths last week from its nationwide tracker after discovering what it called a “coding logic error” that had mistakenly counted deaths from 26 states that were not COVID-19-related. The removal caused all-time reported childhood deaths from the virus to drop nearly 24% in the tracker.
However, Florida Department of Health spokesman Jeremy Redfern told the National Review that the CDC got it wrong. Included in the 72,000 removed deaths were roughly 20,000 Florida deaths that the state had previously informed the CDC were, in fact, COVID-19-related.
“Instead of calling us and verifying these data, they decided to switch to a different field in the data set and just delete a bunch of our deaths,” he said.
“All those cases they deleted they’re going to have to put back on there. And my guess is they’re not going to tell anybody that they’re putting it back on there. They’re just going to do it and hope that nobody notices,” said Redfern, referring to the COVID-19 deaths reported by the Sunshine State.
“It’s definitely not new—for them to cause issues,” he added.