A report from Florida’s auditor general appears to support what some officials said in 2020 – that the state’s COVID-19 data was inaccurate and incomplete during the first nine months of the pandemic, making it difficult for people to know the extent of the contagion.
“We analyzed the data for the 5,539,899 profiles for which COVID-19 tests were recorded … and noted that important demographic data was not always available or the data fields contained anomalies that limited the accuracy and usefulness of the information for reporting and for monitoring outbreaks,” reads the 33-page report from Auditor General Sherrill Norman.
A top state health official told the Miami Herald that the report was flawed and “huge advancements” had been made in modernizing the state’s reporting systems.
The audit noted that case and death data was missing from official state counts, ethnic and racial details were not always reported and contact tracing was not completed.
“The Department (of Health) did not routinely perform data analyses to assess the completeness of all reported test results,” the report said.
As an example of potentially lax reporting and verification efforts, the audit compared Florida’s three NFL football teams, which used the same protocols to screen players for the virus. All had about the same number of players, but the Miami Dolphins consistently reported more than 70 players being tested each week. The Jacksonville Jaguars showed less than 50 tested athletes most weeks.
“Based on our analysis, it appears that the NFL players’ test results were not always reported in Merlin, or were not timely reported in Merlin,” the health department’s tracking system. At least 39 players on at least one game-day roster had no tests reported at all for a month-long period, the report noted.
The auditors also found some 3,000 cases of COVID that were reported by physicians that didn’t appear in the state’s list of deaths from the disease. In a sample of 2,600 tests taken at three state-run testing facilities the audit found that state-contracted laboratories failed to return results for nearly 60% of tests.
“We recommend that Department management take appropriate actions to ensure that public health data collected and reported is accurate and complete,” the report said. “Such actions should include the performance of edit checks and analyses, where practical and available, to detect errors, inconsistencies, and outliers in the data and efforts to resolve any issues noted.”
The Department of Health told the auditor general that it concurs with the report’s recommendation to improve the accuracy of future data collection and that it will investigate discrepancies and review data policies by the end of the year.
As of Tuesday, Florida had seen a total of 6.2 million cases of COVID and 74,715 deaths, according to data compiled by The New York Times. That’s about 7.3% of the U.S. totals, a slightly higher ratio than the Florida population compared to the national population.
The auditor general’s report did not examine other state agencies’ reporting of COVID-19 data. Florida is one of the few states that regularly reports COVID workers’ compensation claims information. And as of late March, the latest data available, the state had seen a total of almost 72,000 workers’ compensation claims for COVID-19 illness, a number that had increased only slightly since January, according to the Florida Division of Workers’ Compensation.
The data show 5,912 claims filed in January, the highest number since August. But only 581 claims were filed in February and 72 in March. Most claims were from workers in the education, health services and public administration fields.
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