Thousands of Florida residents have died due to coronavirus over the past year, according to new data from the state’s Department of Health website — a figure that is significantly lower than was seen during the worst parts of the pandemic, but worryingly higher than has been recently observed.
According to those figures, 3,162 Floridians died from COVID-19 over the past 12 months. That number is smaller than how many passed away from the virus in previous years, but represents larger year-to-year numbers than were counted in June and July, indicating a slight increase in the rate of new deaths from the virus.
Around 21.5 million people live in Florida, meaning that more than 14 out of every 100,000 residents have died in the state due to complications from COVID-19 over the past year.
Information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests the number could be higher — according to that site, from August 5 of 2023 to August 3 of 2024 (which includes preliminary data from the last few weeks that could change), around 3,955 people died in the state due to COVID-19, an increase of 4.96 percent of the total number of deaths seen in Florida since last year.
Coronavirus continues to be problematic for the Sunshine State and its neighbors, despite the pandemic slowing down across the country. While nowhere near the rates that were seen during the height of the pandemic, at the start of 2024, four states within the southeastern part of the U.S. had the highest rate of hospitalizations in the country: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida.
Florida’s numbers could be even higher, as the state has published untrustworthy figures in the past.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis frequently touted his response to the pandemic as a positive one, as he was gearing up for a run for president at the time. But his administration took many actions that likely helped contribute to the spread of the virus in his state, including reopening schools and businesses earlier than other states, fighting mask mandates that localities within Florida had tried to implement, and falsely questioning the efficacy of vaccines for coronavirus when they were made available. Medical experts and data journalists were quick to note at the time that the state was probably undercounting its number of COVID-19 related deaths.
Indeed, a study on excess deaths in Florida — which measures how many deaths are seen versus how many should be expected, based on statistics from an ordinary year — found that, during the pandemic, the state experienced a much higher rate of death than it was reporting from COVID-19.
“We suspect that [the vast majority] of the excess deaths that we are seeing above the official COVID tallies are COVID deaths,” a co-author of the report said at the time.
The State of Florida also terminated a whistleblower, Rebekah Jones, who worked for the Department of Health as a data compiler at the start of the pandemic. Jones refused to follow orders to manipulate data regarding COVID-19, she said, and asked for information on how to file a state whistleblower report regarding her superiors’ actions, which resulted in her termination.
After she was fired, backers of DeSantis, urged at the direction of one of his spokespeople, engaged in a “coordinated online defamation campaign” against Jones, according to the National Whistleblower Center.
“The Governor of Florida targeted Ms. Jones for her commitment to data transparency and government accountability, defaming her and sending state police to raid her home at gunpoint without a warrant,” that organization also noted.
The office of the Florida Auditor General eventually confirmed Jones’s assertions, finding that the state did indeed undercount COVID-19 deaths.
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