Right-wing media has begun to latch onto a reporting error in Florida’s coronavirus tests to claim that the extent of the virus’ spread is being purposely manipulated for political reasons. In fact, the number of actual positive cases will not have been affected — and they’re still going up in the Sunshine State.
The state of Florida has been setting new records for daily coronavirus cases, with 15,300 positive results reported on Sunday — the highest number reported in a single day by any U.S. state during the pandemic. The newly discovered statistical error that right-wing media are trying to latch onto — after spending the previous months hailing Florida’s approach and its early reopening of businesses, in contrast to blue states like New York — does not involve the state’s dramatic rise in raw case numbers, but instead focuses on the rate of positive cases out of all tests that have been conducted.
The local Fox-owned station in Orlando found that some labs were not reporting most of their negative test results to the state, but just their positive results. As one example of how this mathematical error affected things, the Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a reported positivity rate of 76%, but including more of the missing negative results back into the numbers would produce a positivity rate of 6%.
WOFL reporter Robert Guaderrama wrote: