Ms. Fried, who is also running for governor against incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis, posted the following tweet Aug. 2: “We expect a large data dump of Florida COVID cases, hospitalizations, and tragically, deaths from this weekend to be published by the @CDCgov tomorrow. Our Governor’s health department has that data now but won’t release it.”
A Florida Department of Health spokesperson said Ms. Fried’s claim was “inaccurate and baseless,” according to the report, adding that the department routinely and automatically reports COVID-19 data Monday through Friday to the CDC.
Over the course of the pandemic, Florida’s health department posted daily COVID-19 reports, but when positivity rates began to decline earlier this summer, the state in June moved to issuing weekly reports, according to the network. Researchers and epidemiologists in June told The Wall Street Journal they were worried that lagging data would leave public health leaders with blind spots as new variants of the coronavirus continued to spread, according to a June 9 report.
In a statement to the network, the governor’s office denied Ms. Fried’s claims and said they were based on misinformation she has repeated since May 2020 — “That Florida’s COVID-19 data is somehow being intentionally ‘hidden’ or ‘manipulated’ by Governor DeSantis and/or the Florida Department of Health.”
The governor’s office went on to say that the CDC updates state data, including for Florida, regularly, and that Florida’s health department submits it to the agency every weekday.
“Therefore, the state is in fact providing that data — where else would Fried have gotten it? The data is publicly available, though it’s not clear why Fried is presenting it with her own commentary,” the governor’s office said. “It is surprising and disappointing that a prominent elected official like Commissioner Fried would be spreading innuendo like this.”
