Settlement Forces Florida To Resume Posting Covid Statistics

A courtroom settlement over withheld Covid-19 data that critics say cost thousands of lives has deflated Ron DeSantis’s campaign trail persona as a "freedom warrior" who kept his state open during a deadly peak of the pandemic. Via The Guardian:

The settlement ends a two-year legal battle between the DeSantis administration and a coalition of Democrats, open government advocates and media outlets that began in June 2021 when the Florida health department ended daily updates of Covid cases, deaths and vaccinations on its online dashboard.

The department will pay the plaintiffs’ $152,000 legal bill and resume regular posting of the data that DeSantis’s communications team insisted at the time was no longer necessary because cases had “significantly decreased” and that Florida was “returning to normal”.

In reality, as DeSantis dismissed reporting on the pandemic as “media hysteria”, the Delta variant of the virus was just taking hold, and cases and fatalities spiked, to a record 385 a day in Florida by September 2021. Simultaneously, Florida led the nation in pediatric Covid hospitalizations.

I'd guess this information is coming too late to stop the kind of control DeSantis favors.

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