Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is raising doubts about the sky-high positive coronavirus cases in his state, suggesting “a testing industrial complex” could be jacking them up.
In an interview Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” DeSantis was quizzed about erroneous test results, and said there’s an investigation underway.
"There was a report in Orlando a week or so ago, where you had someone in a motorcycle accident [die], unfortunately," he said, asserting it was categorized as one of the deaths of related to the COVID-19 outbreak "just because the person had previously tested positive.”
“If you're in a car accident, and we've had other instances in which it just was no real relationship [to COVID-19] that's been counted, so we want to look at that and see how pervasive that issue is as well,” he added.
He also laid into the testing process itself.
“There's a testing industrial complex now,” he asserted. “There's a lot of money at stake here, people cranking out these tests. There's private companies involved.”
“So what we've asked is anyone that's gotten a letter, an e-mail, anything, a text message bring that forward because we want to hold people accountable if they're engaged in funny business like that,” he continued.
According to the governor, “People are always trying to do political blame, but I do think the trends are much more positive today than they were two weeks ago."
“We peaked on emergency department visits for COVID-like illness on July 7th and we've seen a general flattening in the hospital census for COVID so those are the types of indicators where you see you're starting to get stabilization,” he said. “Our positivity rate is slightly down from where it was, which we think will continue.”
“We test everybody,” DeSantis noted. “Most of the people that test positive that are new cases are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and don't require any medical attention and so that's just important context, I think, for people to understand.”
As of Thursday, Florida is reporting more than 389,000 coronavirus cases and more than 5,500 deaths, according to the state’s department of health.
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