Scott Rivkees implements additional COVID-19 fatality review process

Scott Rivkees.

Surgeon General Scott Rivkees has implemented an additional review process for deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Florida.

The announcement comes as Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ administration is facing criticism for beginning discussions on how the state may scale back daily coronavirus reporting to semiweekly or weekly updates.

Rivkees, who oversees the Department of Health, said officials reported 95 deaths to be included in Wednesday’s report. But the department’s report that details those deaths and new cases and hospitalizations has not been released as of publication time.

Recently, the Division of Emergency Management and DOH have released the data by noon each day. The memo provided no explanation for the current delay. However, the Governor’s communications director, Fred Piccolo, and a department spokesman said the new process caused Wednesday’s delay.

Implementing a data review is “to ensure data integrity,” according to the release.

“During a pandemic, the public must be able to rely on accurate public health data to make informed decisions,” Rivkees said. “To ensure the accuracy of COVID-19 related deaths, the Department will be performing additional reviews of all deaths. Timely and accurate data remains a top priority of the Department of Health.”

Reporting new cases by date of death versus the date reported has long complicated the state’s COVID-19 reporting. Fatalities can take days, weeks and even months to make it into DOH’s logs.

Of the 95 deaths confirmed Tuesday, the DOH memo said 11 were more than 30 days old. Sixteen people tested positive at least two months before they died and five people had tested positive at least three months before they died.

For months, DeSantis has raised questions about the accuracy of the state’s death toll. In July, he said he wanted DOH to identify fatalities that may have been wrongly identified, raising the case of an Orange County man who died in a motorcycle accident but whose death was attributed to COVID-19.

Long gaps between initial infection and the date of death have recently raised “red flags,” Piccolo said, regarding the death toll, causing the state to re-visit the death toll confirmations.

Any person who died in Florida while positive for the coronavirus counts as a COVID-19 fatality, regardless of the primary cause of death.

Piccolo has pushed back recently against highlighting the report-to-report change in death tolls. Instead, he has focused on deaths confirmed the day before that actually occurred that day.

In the Governor’s daily newsletter, Piccolo ran a graphic Monday that suggested only one person died of COVID-19 Sunday when two people had died. He clarified to Florida Politics that the graphic was supposed to say the state knew of one death that had occurred on Saturday, but officials had already counted one more by the newsletter’s distribution time. As of Tuesday’s pandemic report, 10 people had died with COVID-19 Saturday.

With building concerns about Wednesday’s tardy report, Piccolo took to Twitter to clarify the administration’s stance on decreasing the frequency of reports.

“There will be no elimination of COVID-19 data available to the public,” he tweeted. “There is no plan to change reporting frequency or depth anytime in the near future. That is all.”

There is no consensus yet on what indicators might trigger the state to scale back its reporting, he told Florida Politics. Possibilities include daily deaths approaching zero, but he indicated the dozens of deaths still being backfilled per day mean a decrease in reporting is still a ways away.

Last week, outgoing House Speaker José Oliva questioned the state’s COVID-19 death toll in a memo to House members, warning that the death toll was based on compromised data and used a methodology that inflated death rates. Oliva had ordered an in-house analysis of the state’s data.

“Precision in data is imperative, not just for proper decision-making, but also for public confidence and consistency of response,” Oliva wrote in the memo accompanying the analysis. “The great disparity of perspective between the political parties has been further exacerbated by the loosening of process and fidelity to established norms in classification. Our leaders cannot build upon the soft-footing of compromised data.”

DOH provided 13,920 COVID-19 death certificates to House staff members for analysis. Sixty percent of the death certificates had reporting errors and, the analysis said, did not adhere “to the national standards for completion of  death certificates in general and guidelines for COVID-19 related deaths in particular.”

The analysis also found that most of the death certificates were filled out by medical examiners and not by physicians who cared for patients before they died.

Piccolo and a DOH spokesman say the department should be releasing Wednesday’s coronavirus update shortly.

“Department of Health staff have been working to update today’s report appropriately and in accordance with the press release issued earlier today,” DOH’s Alberto Moscoso said. “Today’s up-to-date, accurate report will be available shortly.”