Marion county, a leader in COVID-19 deaths

The State of Florida and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) failed to properly coordinate for over three months during the summer, resulting in the number of deaths as a result of COVID-19 not being reported to the public, according to a Tampa Bay Times article.

Florida ended its public daily reporting of COVID-related statistics, including deaths broken down by county, on June 4. However, the state still reported daily numbers of infections, vaccinations, and deaths, among other statistics to the CDC, and expected the general public to access them via the CDC’s website.

While Florida reported their data to the CDC, the CDC did not adjust their reporting aggregation process to account for the state’s change from daily reports to weekly, and as a result, Florida’s data, including daily COVID deaths, did not show up for over 100 days.
Both the state and the CDC blame each other for the mix-up, with the CDC saying Florida stopped reporting the numbers, and the state countering that it had been submitting the data all along, just in a different format.

Regardless of whose fault it was, Florida’s COVID death statistics are once again easily available to the public, and the data as it relates to Marion County is less than stellar.

According to data from June 5 on (when it was no longer easily accessible), there were 694 deaths in the county, which ranks Marion 6 out of the 67 Florida counties for most COVID deaths per 100,000 since June 5 with 186.3 deaths per 100,000 residents.

Additionally, Marion County has reported 1,690 total deaths due to COVID since the pandemic began. No other county in the top ten has over 1,000 with the next closest being St. Lucie County with 979 total deaths.

Further, of the top ten counties, Marion has the third highest total COVID deaths per 100,000. The county reported 453.7 deaths per 100,000 residents, behind Citrus County (500.9 per 100,000) and St. Lucie County (523.5).

The state will release its next round of COVID numbers on Friday, Oct 22.