By Paul Waldmiller
Did you know that a fired Florida scientist has started her own Coronavirus dashboard to track positive cases?
This past May, Rebekah Jones was terminated from her employment with the Florida Department of Health, where she was instrumental in helping to create a data portal regarding the state’s Covid-19 cases. After being fired, Ms. Jones created a dashboard of her own.
Jones claims that she was originally tasked with building a similar type of dashboard for the health department’s website in her position as a geographic information system manager until it became clear what the results would show.
According to Rebekah Jones, she claims that “When I went to show them what the report card would say for each county, among other things, they asked me to delete the report card because it showed that no counties, pretty much, were ready for reopening.” She says, “And they didn’t want to draw attention to that.” A spokesman for Governor DeSantis denied the allegation and insisted that Jones was let go for “disruptive behavior and insubordination.”
Email messages seen by some including The Tampa Bay Times show some of the data Jones was ordered to delete included Floridians reporting Coronavirus symptoms months earlier than their cases were confirmed. On Jone’s dashboard, the number of people tested significantly lower than the official figure. Ms. Jones attempted to clarify this issue by stating that the State of Florida numbers are actually a tally of the number of samples taken and not the number of people tested. Her Coronavirus dashboard tested 895,947 Floridians, whereas the state dashboard listed the number of people tested as more than 1.5 million.
Politics appears to have taken over the debate between Jones’ dashboard and the State of Florida’s reported numbers of positive cases regarding the Covid-19 Virus. This past May, Terrie Rizzo, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, released a statement calling for an investigation but it appears no investigation has taken place at this date. If an investigation has taken place, the State of Florida has not yet released its findings.