It appears that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been caught lying about the extent of the Coronavirus outbreak in Florida, and the national media is finally catching on, or at least Salon is. There have been inconsistencies in the data coming out of Florida and several other states with Republican Governors for weeks. I have brought this issue up here, here, and here.

These data discrepancies are not an accident, and DeSantis is not the only governor that is doing it. The Republicans want to march our nation back into the front lines against this virus as described by David Frum in the Atlantic, and they needed reasonable but friendly data to provide evidentiary support for the Republican Party’s reckless “plan”. The data discrepancies between Republican Governors and Democratic Governors were not a coincidence, and the data got more suspicious when the states were re-sorted by which Governors had aggressive Social Distancing policies vs. those Governors that were hostile to Social Distancing policies. Anti-SD, Trump-friendly Governors were showing much sunnier case and infection data than the other Governors because they knew that Trump wanted to re-open the economy sooner and if they should show that the outbreak was “under control”, even if it was not, then they would make Trump happy.

These Trump-friendly, anti-Social Distancing Governors appear to be manipulating very important data in order to convince us to walk into a tornado of infections and death because the Republicans think if they can get the right economic trend line then Trump has a chance of being re-elected. What are we going to do about it?