While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis travels the state promoting his performance in fighting the coronavirus, he often points to a relatively low infection rate among children – even after his administration has forced school districts to offer in-person learning.
But this week, according to NBC 6 investigators, he twice misled the public about how Florida compares to other states in terms of infection rates among schoolchildren.
During comments on Monday that criticized Democrats, he said, putting teachers’ unions “ahead of the welfare of our children”, he praised how Florida protected schoolchildren from the virus compared to other states .
“We have been (learning) personally as much as anyone in the country. Still, we are the 34th among 50 states and DC for cases of COVID-19 on a per capita basis for children,” he said.
This is not true, unless – as the governor did – you ignore more than 50,000 children over the age of 14 who contracted the virus.
Using statistics for children under 15, he effectively removed high school students from the data he cited twice this week to validate his decision to offer face-to-face classes to all public school students.
The states that DeSantis was comparing Florida to include, in fact, these older students.
When states reporting cases among children under 18 are compared to Florida’s rate for the same age group, Florida ranks ninth – not 34th – according to an NBC 6 analysis of Department of Health data state and the US Census Bureau.
The governor compounded his data distortion on Tuesday in a tweet to his more than 717,000 followers.
“Our children belong to the school and Florida’s decision to keep schools open was the right thing to do,” he said in the tweet, which on Wednesday night was liked or retweeted more than 12,000 times. “When compared to other states of similar size, Florida has fewer pediatric cases per 100,000.”
To emphasize this point, he attached a graph intended to show Florida’s “pediatric case rate” for Ohio, Illinois and California, which is almost twice the population of Florida.
But the rate he attributed to Florida – 3,794 cases per 100,000 – excluded anyone over the age of 14. The Ohio and Illinois numbers included anyone under the age of 20 and in California, anyone under the age of 18.
The governor’s office confirmed on Wednesday that it withdrew data from a February 4 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association – a report that specifically does not rank states and clearly notes that the data for Florida and Utah only were cut above 14 years.
In a statement to NBC 6, the governor’s office said: “While there may be subtle differences in case rates for the different age groups used by states (0-14, 0-17, 0-18 etc.), these differences do not prohibits a general side-by-side comparison. “
If the differences were “subtle”, as your office suggested, this may be true.
But our investigation finds that the differences are not subtle.
These differences undermined DeSantis’ argument when he compared Florida’s rates for children under 15 with rates in other states that also included older children.
Remember: DeSantis said that Florida ranked 34th in pediatric case rates (when it actually ranks ninth among the states that report cases to everyone under 18).
And, when the latest comparable data available for the states on the DeSantis chart were analyzed by NBC 6, comparing the same age groups, consider the not-so-subtle differences that we found:
- Illinois’s rate was not 42% higher than Florida’s; it was almost the same;
- Ohio’s rate was not 4% higher than Florida’s; was 25% lower; and,
- California’s rate was not 25% higher than Florida’s; it was less than a third of that, about 7% higher.
None of this refutes DeSantis’ claim that he “did the right thing” by opening schools more than other states did.
And his office said he was not claiming that his decision made the children do better than elsewhere.
“The chart is not intended to discuss the cause,” said his office’s communications team by email. “Instead, the intention is to illustrate, using standardized and publicly available data, that there is no demonstrated difference in cases where schools are open compared to states where schools are closed.”
Still, DeSantis rhetorically linked his decision to open schools to what he claimed was his state’s position in the lower third of states when it comes to pediatric infection rates; instead, it is in the top 10.
In his comments on Monday, DeSantis went on to criticize the CDC and the Democrats for not taking the Florida initiative when it comes to recommending the opening of schools.
“This is a shame,” he said. “This is not science. This is putting politics ahead of what is right for children. This is putting politics and special interests ahead of what the evidence and observed experience say.”
The next day, he sent his tweet.