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At first, she says, she laughed out loud: “I thought it was a joke.”
This was the first time she’d been asked to outright lie. Up until that moment, Jones had had plenty of concerns with how Florida was handling the pandemic, but she considered them outside of her purview-matters of policy, not data (for example, the decision to exempt rural counties from more stringent reopening criteria). “And she was like, ‘Well, just change it to 10.’” (Requests for comment from Shamarial Roberson, Florida’s deputy secretary for health, went unanswered, but she previously told the Tampa Bay Times, “It is patently false to say that the Department of Health has manipulated any data.”) “There were counties that had, like, 18 or 20 percent positivity,” Jones recalls. It had been praised by the state surgeon general and by then–White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, MD, for its functionality and transparency.īut now, a top state official was telling her to change the test positivity rate of certain counties to align with the state’s maximum threshold for reopening, according to Jones. Jones was so proud of the dashboard-which included six maps and covered half a million lines of data-that she monitored it for up to 16 hours a day. Then a 30-year-old scientist at the Florida Department of Health (DOH), she’d spent nearly two months building the platform that the state was using to provide daily updates to the press and public on COVID-19, including number of tests, confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. It was April 2020 when Rebekah Jones says* they first asked her to change the numbers.