Tuesday, Sep. 14, 2021
Was a recent Florida report of more than 1,200 COVID-19 deaths in a day well above the recent overall trend?
Florida has experienced a sharp recent rise in COVID-19 deaths. The 7-day average as of Sept. 10 was 350 per day, compared with 50 or fewer in late June.
Health officials focus on average numbers for a more accurate picture than that offered by daily reports. On Sept. 7 the state reported 1,291 deaths; the prior day, the Labor Day holiday, it reported none.
Tracking changes during August was made more confusing for the public by a change in how the state recorded fatalities. Along with a couple of other states, Florida changed from using the date the death was reported to the date the death occurred. The Miami Herald noted that the change resulted in a temporary understatement of the state's mortality rate—in one week cited by the Herald, there were 262 daily deaths measured under the old method, but 46 under the new.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.
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