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CDC Corrects Florida COVID Data After Health Department Complains

   DailyWire.com
HIALEAH, FLORIDA - AUGUST 05: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference held at the Assault Brigade 2506 Honorary Museum on August 05, 2021 in Hialeah, Florida. The governor and other politicians addressed the media on their desire to see America push for democracy and freedom in Cuba and throughout Latin America.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its Florida COVID-19 case count on Wednesday, apparently in response to a public complaint from the Florida Department of Health.

As The Daily Wire reported on Tuesday, Florida blasted the CDC for posting COVID-19 case numbers the Florida Health Department said were “false” and combined several days of data, “creating a scary graph misleading the public.

At the time, the department, which resorted to posting its complaint on social media, said that they “anticipated[d]” a correction from the CDC.

“Wrong again,” the Florida DOH noted on Twitter. “The number of cases [CDC] released for Florida today is incorrect. They combined MULTIPLE days into one. We anticipate CDC will correct the record.”

The tweet referenced a South Florida Sentinel report, which alleged that Florida “hit yet another record number of new daily cases, reporting 28,317 on Sunday.”

“The CDC reported 28,317 new cases on Sunday, which WSVN reported would mark the most confirmed infections in one day in the state since the beginning of the pandemic,” Fox News reported. “Multiple media organizations picked up on the number and the department corrected the stories online with some bite.”

The Florida DOH, instead, claimed that there were 15,319 cases on Sunday — still a high — as well as a three-day rolling average of 18,795 cases. They alleged that they follow the CDC’s own guidelines for collecting and reporting data and that the state had yet to cross 20,000 cases.

On Wednesday, the CDC acknowledged an issue with its case count, according to Fox News, and told the network it was updating its COVID-19 case tracker and “working with the state’s health department to correct the information.”

The state did surpass the 20,000-case mark on Tuesday, Fox News said — at least according to CDC numbers.

“On Tuesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the state has surpassed 20,000 for its 7-day average of new cases, a day after the federal agency misreported numbers given by the Florida Department of Health by combining data from the last three days into two,” Fox said. “Hospitalizations rose by more than 1,100 on Tuesday to 14,787 patients with COVID-19, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. More than 47% of ICU beds were taken by about 3,000 coronavirus patients. That number has nearly tripled in the last three weeks.”

Overall, the United States reported around 43,000 cases of the coronavirus over the past week, according to CNBC, which also notes that the numbers are far off pandemic highs, even though they are higher than previous weeks. Although national media has focused its ire largely on Florida and Texas, cases are also rising significantly in Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Nevada.

CNBC does note that while case counts are rising, deaths are ticking up at a much slower rate and are not expected to reach the levels seen earlier in the pandemic.

“Deaths haven’t risen because we have done an incredible job of fully vaccinating the populations most likely to die from Covid-19, especially those over 65 and nursing and assisted home residents,” an infectious disease specialist from the University of California San Francisco told CNBC. “Deaths also lag infection rate in a few cases, but I also anticipate the death rate not to budge.”

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