While Florida Gov. 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 forced school districts to offer in-person learning.
But this week, according to NBC 6 researchers, it twice fooled the public about how Florida gets used to other states when it comes to infection rates among school-age children.
During comments he made Monday to Democrats against Democrats, he said, putting teachers’ unions “ahead of the welfare of our children,” he said Florida protects schoolchildren from the virus compared to other states.
“We have been in person (learning) as much as anyone in the country. However, we are 34th out of every 50 states and DC for COVID-19 cases per capita for children,” he said.
This is not true, unless, as the governor did, he ignores more than 50,000 children over the age of 14 who contracted the virus.
By using a statistic for under-15s, 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 compared Florida to include, in fact, those older students.
When states reporting cases under the age of 18 are compared to the Florida rate for the same age group, Florida ranks ninth (not 34th), according to an analysis by NBC 6 of the Department of Human Data. State Health and U.S. Census Bureau data.
The governor compounded his misrepresentation of the data Tuesday in a tweet to his more than 717,000 followers.
“Our kids belong in school and Florida’s decision to keep schools open was the right one,” he said in the tweet, which as of Wednesday night had been liked or retweeted more than 12,000 times. “Compared to other states of similar size, Florida has fewer pediatric cases per 100,000.”
To emphasize the issue, he attached a chart that was intended to show Florida’s “pediatric case rate” to those in Ohio, Illinois and California, which has nearly twice the population of Florida.
But the rate he assigned to Florida (3,794 cases per 100,000) excluded anyone over the age of 14. The Ohio and Illinois figures included anyone under the age of 20 and anyone in California under the age of 18.
The governor’s office confirmed Wednesday that it pulled that data from a Feb. 4 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association (a report that doesn’t specifically classify states) and makes it clear that only data from Florida and Utah were cut. from the age of 14.
In a statement to NBC 6, the governor’s office said, “While there may be subtle differences in case rates for different age brackets used by states (0-14, 0-17, 0- 18, etc.), these differences are not prohibitive a general comparison side by side. “
If the differences were “subtle,” as his office suggested, this may be true.
But according to our research, the differences are not subtle.
These differences undermined DeSantis ’argument when he compared Florida rates for under-15s to rates in other states that also included older children.
Remember: DeSantis said Florida ranked 34th in pediatric case rates (when in fact it ranks ninth among states reporting cases for all children under 18).
And, when the latest comparable data available for DeSantis chart states were analyzed by NBC 6, comparing the same age groups, we consider the not-so-subtle differences we discovered:
- The rate in Illinois was not 42% higher than in Florida; it was almost the same;
- The rate in Ohio was not 4% higher than in Florida; it was 25% lower; i,
- The rate in California was not 25% higher than in Florida; it was less than a third, about 7% higher.
None of this refutes DeSantis’ claim that he “did the right thing” by opening more schools than other states.
And his office said he did not say his decision would make the children do better than those in other places.
“The graph is not intended to argue causation,” his office’s communications staff said in an email. “Rather, it is intended to illustrate, using standardized and publicly available data, that there are no demonstrated differences in cases in open states compared to closed states.”
Still, DeSantis has rhetorically related his decision to open schools to what he claimed was his state’s place in the lower third of states when it comes to pediatric infection rates; instead, it is in the top ten.
In his comments Monday, DeSantis blasted CDC and Democrats for not taking Florida’s lead in recommending the opening of schools.
“That’s a disgrace,” he said. “This is not science. This is putting politics ahead of what is appropriate 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.