COVID reporting timeline from 2020 to now: How Florida changed what it tells us about cases

After a two-year battle over COVID public records, the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) settled a nearly two-year-old lawsuit in October and released information spanning the entire duration of the pandemic on the state's FLHealthCHARTS.gov site.

It's just the latest change in how the state reports COVID counts after years of slow-walking or refusing public records requests for specific COVID data.

Here's how the reporting has changed during the pandemic.

How has COVID reporting in Florida changed?

March 2020, Reporting begins: When the virus became widespread, the FDOH began issuing a comprehensive daily report of cases and deaths, with lists of cases with each person’s age, gender, location and date of testing, hospitalization numbers and numbers of deaths by county and even by city. The report also included information on cases and deaths in longterm care facilities, assisted living centers, group homes, and correctional facilities. The state also created a COVID dashboard on the FDOH site.

May 2020, Rebekah Jones fired: The FDOH scientist responsible for creating the state's COVID dashboard, Rebekah Jones, claims she was fired for refusing to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen." She built her own coronavirus dashboard and began talking to national media about state pressure to cook the books.

August 2020, MEs allowed to skip reporting: The state tells medical examiners they can stop reporting COVID deaths due to the huge backlog.

September 2020, School reports begin: The state begins publishing pediatric and school-related cases, but the numbers are inconsistent with what schools were self-reporting.

December 2020, Rebekah Jones raid: Police raid Rebekah Jones' home and seize all her "hardware and tech" after showing her a warrant based on a complaint filed by the Florida Department of Health as part of an investigation regarding what they said was unauthorized access to a DOH messaging system. Jones said it was to hamper her own COVID data updates and take her "evidence of corruption at the state level."

After video of the raid goes viral, DeSantis lashes out at Jones, calling her "a darling of some corners of the fever swamps."

January 2021, Insufficient data: The FDOH declines requests for data regarding demographics of cases and deaths at a time when national reporting shows that Black people, and other people of color, are at higher risk during the pandemic, with a spokesperson saying it wasn't available. That data was later included in full after a lawsuit.

Want public records? ‘So sue me’ seems to be state’s attitude, First Amendment experts say

June 2021, Florida stops daily reports: The FDOH took down its COVID dashboard and stopped sending reports daily, saying that cases had "significantly decreased over the past year" and the state was "returning to normal," according to DeSantis' then-press secretary Christina Pushaw.

Instead, it switched to a weekly update, the first state to do so. These reports were far less detailed, without the names of facilities with infections, school-related numbers or numbers of deaths by county. This came the month after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order lifting all local COVID restrictions. Then the deadly delta variant hit.

July 2021, COVID surge, lawsuit: By the next month, cases had surged again as the highly transmissible variant spread like wildfire across the nation, leading to the then-highest numbers for the nation yet. In May 2021, Florida reported 88,545 cases and 907 deaths. In July it reported 295,302 cases and 2,081 deaths.

DeSantis signed an order that month "protecting the rights of parents" that prohibited local school districts from implementing COVID-19 safeguards, including mask requirements, and threatened to cut funding and even salaries for those who go against his order. At the time, Florida was leading the nation with 20% of all new COVID infections.

Then-state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, and the Florida Center for Government Accountability sued the state of Florida for refusing to turn over pediatric COVID data. The state claimed it was confidential, although it had been including exactly that data previously in the daily reports. The state later claimed in court that the records did not exist.

August 2021, Deadliest month in Florida: The state's second-worse month for cases still to date (647,174) and the deadliest month in the entire pandemic with over 10,000 fatalities reported, according to the FDOH. The state continues to issue weekly reports.

Over 800 Florida physicians send a letter to DeSantis asking for a repeal of the school mask ban and the return of the daily reports in full. DeSantis says the state will look at releasing more county-level data. That data is not produced. In the same week, DeSantis claims, without evidence, that migrants are bringing COVID across the border.

September 2021, News media join lawsuit: USA TODAY Network and other Florida news organizations join the public records lawsuit.

March 2022, State stops weekly report: The state changed its COVID report again, reducing it to biweekly, again less often than every other state at the time. People looking for statistics were directed to days-old data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In the biweekly report, the summary of cases and deaths at the top only listed the increase for the previous seven days even though the reports were two weeks apart, providing a possibly misleading perception of the virus' danger. State reports also included only Florida residents and not visitors for cases and deaths, but did include visitors for vaccination totals.

May 2022, Florida finds itself innocent: A state investigation by the FDOH's Office of Chief Inspector General, Michael J. Bennett, who reports to Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel within Gov. Ron DeSantis' office, finds that Rebekah Jones' claims of data manipulation were unsubstantiated.

March 2023, Totals updated: The CDC added 15,993 COVID cases to its Florida total that had not been previously reported between November and March. No explanation was provided as to why.

October 2023, Florida releases more data, less conveniently: The state of Florida settles the public records lawsuit without admitting guilt and must pay $152,000 in legal costs. The biweekly reports stop in favor of a database including information for all three years of the pandemic.

However, while the new format of the reports now includes the demographic data for all three years the state previously said didn't exist, it is less convenient as there are no cumulative totals, percentages, charts or overviews included, making trends tougher to spot without doing the math, and data on booster doses is no longer provided.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Florida COVID numbers: How the state has changed reports over the years