Via The Washington Post: Rebekah Jones, Florida’s fired coronavirus data scientist, publishes her own dashboard. Excerpt:
Tension built for days between Florida Department of Health supervisors and the department’s geographic information systems manager before officials showed her the door, she says, permanently pulling her off the coronavirus dashboard that she operated for weeks.
Managers had wanted Rebekah Jones to make certain changes to the public-facing portal, she says. Jones had objected to — and sometimes refused to comply with — what she saw as unethical requests. She says the department offered to let her resign. Jones declined.
Weeks after she was fired in mid-May, Jones has now found a way to present the state’s coronavirus data exactly the way she wants it: She created a dashboard of her own.
“I wanted to build an application that delivered data and helped people get tested and helped them get resources that they need from their community,” Jones, 30, said of the site that launched Thursday. “And that’s what I ended up building with this new dashboard.”
White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx praised Florida’s official coronavirus dashboard in April as a beacon of transparency. But Jones has asserted that the site undercounts the state’s infection total and overcounts the number of people tested — with the official numbers bolstering the decision to start loosening restrictions on the economy in early May, when the state had not met federal guidelines for reopening.
The competing opinions about how to frame Florida’s data underscore the importance of access to accurate information about the virus’s spread as the state continues to lift restrictions on public life. Among other data-related controversies, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) came under heavy scrutiny after Jones first alleged publicly that the health department was manipulating statistics to support his desire to reopen.
The Florida governor’s office and the health department did not respond Friday to an email seeking comment on Jones’s new dashboard. In a previous statement, a spokeswoman for the governor said Jones “exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the Department, including her unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”
Jones’s allegations about other managers’ requests are serious. She claimed they asked her to delete data showing that some residents tested positive for the coronavirus in January, even though DeSantis assured residents in March that there was no evidence of community spread. Jones also alleged that she was asked to manually change numbers to wrongly make counties appear to have met metrics for reopening.
Despite the differences between the two dashboards, the site that Jones launched Thursday relies on the health department’s data. She said she wrote code that pulls information from various reports on the department’s website and presents the data in a way that she believes adds more context. Her dashboard also incorporates data from hospitals and from a volunteer organization that maps coronavirus testing sites.
On Jones’s dashboard, the number of people tested is significantly lower than the official figure. She said the state’s number is actually a tally of the number of samples taken — not the number of people tested. Her dashboard said Florida had tested 895,947 people as of Friday evening, whereas the state dashboard listed the number of people tested as more than 1.3 million.
