I would also argue that the true number of FL covid related deaths was higher than reported. Just like China, Deathsantis clamped down on reporting of deaths.
As far as I can tell Florida’s “undercount” most of the articles I seem to cite a discrepancy of ~3,000 uncounted deaths, which is about 3.5% of the 87,000. Much of this seems to be caused by integration issues between reporting databases, labs, hospitals, etc. Information integration in healthcare is a total mess as it is and things like this are not particularly uncommon. Let’s please remember that that woman who accused Florida of meddling with their data is crazy, a grifter (who raised $350k+ on the back of her lies), has completely misrepresented everything that’s ever happened to her, and has been completely discredited. Unfortunately the pathological partisanship got in the way of people looking at the situation before forming an opinion and donating money to her. Her accusations as I recall did prompt an AG investigation that found some errors, but nothing that appears to be a giant conspiracy.
The fact of the matter is COVID-19 deaths to this day likely remain BOTH overcounted and undercounted. While some of the systematic overcounting has been addressed there is still a lot of wiggle room to over classify things. At the same time, there were likely many people who died without their symptoms or having a test who were never counted. Some data is just going to not exist due to reporting errors. During the height of the pandemic reporting accuracy was necessarily at the forefront of HCP’s minds. California apparently has 20,000 missing deaths. NY undercounted COVID-19 deaths as much as 50% according to an internal audit- except we know there was a lot of funny business there with Cuomo. But in most cases I expect most states have similar problems and if they don’t, it’s probably because they haven’t reviewed hard enough.
As for state to state or country to country comparisons- it’s a far more complicated analysis than comparing CFRs between states. Population age distribution, population density, health status/pre-existing conditions, socioeconomic status, access to healthcare, when peaks were experienced, etc are all factors that confound the data considerably. On top of that, as I have long argued, health outcomes are just one factor. It’s not typical for epidemiology to have a single metric. Other factors such as effect on the economy, children's education, societal mental health, etc are all also important considerations with potentially profound consequences.
Rather than the government actually reflecting upon what worked, what didn’t, how to best prevent and respond to a future pandemic, maybe how public health can gain/maintain trust and communicate to the public, etc they’d rather focus on partisanship and Fauci and out of context death rates and other such spectacles. While the origin of COVID is very important, as are any potential conspiracies, I have a very long list of things that just as important if not substantially more so. There are many important lessons to be learned but people either don’t care at this point or are so entrenched in politics to concede anything or are fully interested in protecting their past decisions that most of this will probably just be swept under the rug by those who are responsible.
