Florida cuts COVID data reporting to every 2 weeks

Florida limits COVID data to every 2 weeks, state says via meme Department of Health officials announced the change via Twitter, using Vince McMahon and cat memes. Tampa Bay Times

Florida officials have again rolled back access to the state’s COVID-19 data, and will now only release key pandemic metrics such as the number of people who have been infected, died and vaccinated once every two weeks instead of every week.

The state did not announce the new policy in any traditional fashion, such as issuing a press release or an official statement via its social media accounts.

Instead, Florida Department of Health spokesperson Jeremy Redfern made the announcement at 4:31 p.m. Friday using his personal Twitter account. The tweet included a popular meme featuring World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Vince McMahon reacting to the news.

The Florida Department of Health then retweeted Redfern’s announcement at 7:49 p.m., adding a cat meme and noting that it’s “no longer season 1 of the pandemic.”

It is the second time in nine months that the state has reduced the frequency that it shares the latest pandemic data with the public. The state said it will continue to send daily data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posts them online in conjunction with other states.

“Creating multiple reports is time consuming, and we are working to shift our focus onto the endemic stage of COVID-19,” Redfern said in a Monday email to the Tampa Bay Times. ...

Once, experts praised Florida for its data transparency. The state released data every day and set up a website that allowed the public, experts and journalists to easily analyze the trajectory of the pandemic when the virus started spreading in 2020.

Then state officials shut down its online COVID-19 database and switched to weekly reports in June 2021, weeks before the delta variant appeared in Florida. At the time the state also shut down its daily COVID-19 data website and stopped issuing other reports, including on infections in prisons, schools and long-term care facilities. ...