One thing I would love people who think Florida is cooking the books to really think about is:

How, exactly, are they doing this?

Walk me through this process. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1387096352845225984

Deaths are reported to the state from the county health departments

Are you saying that DeSantis is changing the numbers from the county health departments?

So we would get the right number if we added up the individual counties individually?

Or are you saying every county health department in Florida is in on the scam?

So even the blue-est of the blue counties in Florida is in cahoots with DeSantis to lie to their constituents?

Do you think it's a definition problem? Do you think Florida defines "death due to COVID" differently than everyone else?

Are you aware those definitions are actual medical codes? So you'd have to get every hospital and doctor in Florida to be in on this conspiracy.

Do you know that in many cases hospitals report their numbers directly to the state health department as well as the county health department?

Did you know Florida publishes hospital-by-hospital numbers? So if the state was changing them, the hospital would see that.

This is a pretty decent attempt to come up with some coherent evidence of "hidden deaths"

My follow-up question would be: What evidence would you accept as an indicator that these claims weren't true? https://twitter.com/Jinkinson1/status/1386678738344194051

For those who are uninterested in giving bad journalism a click, here are those articles on http://archive.is 

https://archive.is/tRLye#selection-3211.0-3324.0

https://archive.is/6541f 

The problem these articles have is that they don't follow up on any of this.

If their claims are true, then we should see the COVID death disparity show up in the excess deaths difference, which you can't hide.

But we don't see that disparity.

The end result is people end up cornering themselves into the position that Texas and Florida are massively undercounting COVID deaths (presumably coding them as non-COVID) but those non-COVID aren't counting toward excess deaths either, essentially disappearing from the data

By the way, this is why Nate Silver keeps pointing to the excess deaths data. He is pointing out that we should see *really* bad and unexplainable excess deaths out of Florida if they were hiding deaths.

There are only two states that have abnormally high excess death data that isn't coded as COVID

New York and Michigan