The Florida Department of Health accused the CDC on Friday of wrongly deleting roughly 20,000 Florida deaths from its nationwide COVID Data Tracker.
The CDC removed 72,277 deaths last Wednesday 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.But Florida Department of Health spokesman Jeremy Redfern said the CDC got it wrong.
Redfern said the CDC will have no choice but to reinstate the 20,000 erroneously deleted Florida deaths to its nationwide COVID Data Tracker. In August 2021, the CDC announced that Florida had reported 80,536 new COVID-19 cases over the course of one weekend. But the agency had to correct the data after the Florida DOH said the actual case total for that weekend clocked in at 56,386, a substantially smaller figure.
The CDC came under fire for its lack of transparency surrounding COVID-19 data in late February after the New York Times reported that the agency had published only a small portion of the data it had collected on hospitalizations, vaccines, and wastewater analysis, in part because it feared the information might have been misinterpreted by the public.