Florida Notes

When Florida reports no data, several days of data, or unusual data (such as decreases in values that should increase), our volunteers note it here on the date the anomaly occurred. We also note here changes in our own methodology that affect the data.

Florida combines PCR and antigen tests in the total tests figure reported on the state's dashboard (first noted July 2, 2020). We include data for Florida non-residents in our deaths and hospitalizations figures but not in cases and tests. For some metrics, we use machine queries against the Florida Department of Health's raw data, which may not be displayed on its dashboard.

Per reporting, the number of pending tests (available in our API and CSVs) may include only results from public labs, and may therefore be an undercount.

On January 1, 2020, Florida announced that they would not be updating their data on January 1, 2021 due to the New Year holiday. We were able to update Now hospitalized from Florida's separate hospitalization source.

On December 25, 2020, Florida announced via the official Florida Department of Health twitter that they would not be updating their data on December 25, 2020 due to the Christmas holiday. We were able to update Now hospitalized from Florida's separate hospitalization source.

On December 10, 2020, we cleared Deaths (confirmed) from August 12 onward and are reporting them as Deaths (confirmed and probable). On August 11, Florida added antigen tests to its data definition for deaths, which were previously PCR only.

On November 26, 2020, Florida did not update their data, presumably due to the Thanksgiving holiday.

On November 3, 2020, Florida’s Positive PCR Tests (specimens) dropped by over 200 with no explanation.

On October 30, 2020, the number of negative residents ('T_NegRes') remained unchanged on Florida's ArcGIS layer. The number of unique people tested in 'totalTestsPeopleViral' draws from 'T_NegRes' and 'C_AllResTypes' fields on Florida's ArcGIS layer.

On October 26, 2020, Florida started providing a full timeseries of total test encounters excluding tests from individuals after they test positive. We started capturing this data in our totalTestEncountersViral field. As of October 27, 2020, Florida's total test results are also drawn from our totalTestEncountersViral field instead of calculated via the number of unique individuals testing positive and negative. The number of unique people tested, now drawn from the T_NegRes and C_AllResTypes values on Florida's ArcGIS layer, is still available in totalTestsPeopleViral. The new encounters time-series only reflects Florida residents, so we have also revised our existing cases figures and unique individuals tested figure to reflect only residents. These changes resulted in a 1.28% decrease in Florida's cases and a 0.38% decrease in Florida's unique people tested.

On October 21, 2020, only some of Florida's data updated by our publication time. Data points such as Total PCR Tests (People) did not update.

As of October 13, 2020, Florida's Antigen positive timeseries is stored in our Probable cases field, reflecting a response to our outreach to Florida's health department that it switches Antigen positive cases to PCR positive cases in their daily state report upon confirmatory PCR testing.

On October 10, 2020, Florida did not report COVID-19 data. The state initially reported that this was because Helix Laboratory, a private lab, submitted 400,000 previously submitted results, which required extra deduplication time. On October 12, 2020, the Florida Department of Health announced that the error was not the fault of the private lab, but was due to "an unforeseen technical issue" that was "not the fault of Helix or the Department of Health." The state's data for October 11, 2020 appears to include data from both October 10 and 11.

On September 1, 2020, the Florida Department of Health announced that Quest Diagnostics had reported nearly 75,000 backlogged tests dating as far back as April.

On August 14, 2020, Florida began distinguishing between people with positive antigen tests and people with positive PCR tests in the Total Cases number given in their daily state report. As of September 30, 2020, we have removed these antigen positives from the values for Cases or Confirmed cases (positiveCasesViral in our API), so the values for this metric in our time series will be lower. Cases (confirmed plus probable) (positive in our API) will be unaffected.

On August 12, 2020, the Florida Department of Health reported via Twitter that it had received a large backlog of testing data from Niznik Lab Corp in Miami: "The lab reported over 4,000 cases occurring over the last 7 weeks, but which had not been reported to FDOH until today. Therefore, this backlog severely skews today's daily report for Miami-Dade and is not reflective of current trends."

As of July 10, 2020, Florida reports Now hospitalized data for those patients with a "primary diagnosis of COVID-19."

Since May 15, 2020, Florida reports total tests in unique people and in unique people tested per lab. For that latter number, if an individual is tested twice by one lab, they only get counted once, but if an individual gets tested twice at different labs, they get counted twice. We store the former value in Total PCR Tests (People), and the latter value, which does not match any of our totals units, in Total Tests (PCR), our specimens field, where we also store testing data with unclear units. This value does not represent the number of specimens.

On March 21, 2020, Florida began including tests of people not investigated as PUIs in its Negative PCR tests metric.