ORLANDO, Fla. - After FOX 35 News noticed errors in the state's report on positivity rates, the Florida Department of Health said that some laboratories have not been reporting negative test result data to the state.
Countless labs have reported a 100 percent positivity rate, which means every single person tested was positive. Other labs had very high positivity rates. FOX 35 News found that testing sites like one local Centra Care reported that 83 people were tested and all tested positive. Then, NCF Diagnostics in Alachua reported 88 percent of tests were positive
How could that be? FOX 35 News investigated these astronomical numbers, contacting every local location mentioned in the report.
The report showed that Orlando Health had a 98 percent positivity rate. However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health's positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report.
The report also showed that the Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76 percent. A spokesperson for the VA told FOX 35 News on Tuesday that this does not reflect their numbers and that the positivity rate for the center is actually 6 percent.
FOX 35 News went on to speak with the Florida Department of Health on Tuesday. They confirmed that although private and public laboratories are required to report positive and negative results to the state immediately, some have not. Specifically, they said that some smaller, private labs were not reporting negative test result data to the state.
MORE AT LINK
I find it quite “interesting” that the math exaggerations all go in one direction!
Absolutely no coincidences here - this was all contrived by different labs, using different test subjects, at different days, yet all report from upper 70% to almost 99%!
Sounds like election results in, say, Cuba, Venezuela or China!
Commercial and government laboratories have to maintain various certifications that entail outside audits of their quality control. The scope of the audit starts when a sample first arrives into the lab’s legal chain of custody through storage and analysis to production of the analytical results for customer delivery.
I find it hard to believe that so many labs would be messing with their reporting in the way described. This would basically shut them down via temporary or permanent loss of certifications required to function and to get insurance. Opens them up to lawsuits and probably some criminal liabilities as well. My money is these funny numbers are being generated at the state and/or fed agency end.
Lab reporting of this type is computerized at the lab level. For that matter, individual samples are largely tracked by barcode and and most instruments report their data directly into the data system. Lab reports come in 3 flavors so to speak, ie. brief, standard and full. Brief has the results and key quality control summary, the standard report adds in additional quality control info. The full report includes the whole kitchen sink of quality control info and will make your eyes glaze over. I have tried using brief reports a few times just to make my job easier but even so, the labs strongly prefer using their standard format so I just end up with two stacks of paper to file. I limited requesting full reports unless lawyers were involved.
I’ll stop rambling now! Yea!