Just to clarify my own statement – I think the official numbers include nonresidents, but the Dept of Health dashboard excludes them. So the visual representation, and a common way for the public to get their information, will be deceptive.
So, the crux of the biscuit is residence? Presumably, then, an illegal immigrant in Florida who dies of Covid is even more of a non-person than they were when they were alive. That’s some catch, that Catch-19.
No, the crux of the biscuit is that the state’s website puts the wrong statistics front and center. The state does track nonresident cases, it’s just that they put the total resident cases in really big type on the website. There are other issues like where the state website shows you a county’s total cases since March but fails to mention the since March part.
But if you download the spreadsheet, from the state, it’s all there.
~Max
This is the story I’ve heard. I live in Florida and I have looked at that dashboard damn near every day since it went live. In the early days, she was changing the layout and the data displayed almost daily (usually in response to random requests via e-mail). When the dashboard went viral (pun intended), DOH told her to begin running her proposed changes past management before she published them (you know like every other piece of public facing software anywhere). Purportedly, she refused and was fired.
Must have been a pretty cursory look. The page clearly shows two big numbers: One labeled “Total Cases” (1,094,697 as of this post which exactly matches the line case download) and a slightly smaller number labeled “Positive Residents” (1,076,547). Below that are values for both Florida Resident and Non-Resident Deaths. All of this is on the left side of the main landing page.
Pick on Florida all you want, but please at least be accurate about it.
It appears they were prepared to break down the door to get in. I would certainly call this a raid. I’d also be shitting my pants if this happened to me and my family.
I’ve never been in her situation, but I agree it has to be horrible.
I once had a gun pointed at me. I was pulled over at 3 am for speeding (I was). I asked cop#1 if I could open my glove compartment, since that was where my paperwork was, and he said sure. He saw my Leatherman tool and mistook it for a weapon. He screamed, “WEAPON” and pointed his gun at me. I froze. Luckily cop#2 recognized what it was and told cop#1 to holster his weapon.
I was shaking. No ticket and an apology from cop#2. I had to sit there a few minutes before I could drive home.
Sorry, you are absolutely right. Not sure what I was thinking - I even remember comparing the total count and noting that they don’t match.
~Max
That video also clearly shows that she believed they were pointing a gun at her kids.
Okay, Kojak, what would you call it??
Cops serving a search warrant. It is worth noting that they seemed to use excessive personnel and gear for the situation, and that shouldn’t be ignored. Maybe that’s normal for that police department but it seems over the top to me.
But they showed up, asked to be let in because they had a warrant to collect her electronics for evidence, and waited 20 minutes. In a raid the cops come in without asking and preferably without you knowing so you can’t dispose of the evidence or run away. She could have wiped hard drives or hidden things in 20 minutes so that didn’t seem to be a concern.
Why did they need body armor? Why did they need to draw guns when telling her husband to come down? That looked like they expected an ambush or something. Not a raid, but weird, and it could have been a scare tactic, sure. In which case Florida sucks (no surprise).
Not sure why this needs to be brought up again though. 
No problem. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers - which frankly was one of the problems in the early days of the Dashboard. The numbers were going all over the place and it was retroactively updating data, etc. I really don’t know the full story of what happened at DOH, but I know what I could see and it looked like an undisciplined programmer turned loose with no QA process and no approval pipeline.
None of that is to say that she wasn’t told to manipulate data, of course. Both things could be true.
Finally, I agree the serving of the warrant was done with what looks like excessive force designed to intimidate. But if you’re accusing people of hiding things, taking 20 minutes to answer the door sure makes it look like YOU had something to hide.
Why did they need a sledge hammer?
About that twenty minutes? Sez who?
I think it was in the article, and the officer says something about it in the body cam footage.
~Max
Here is the official statement released by the FDLE, specifically the Commissioner of the department, Rick Swearingen.
“Our investigation began last month following a complaint by Florida Department of Health that a person illegally hacked into their emergency alert system. As part of our investigation, FDLE agents served a search warrant this morning at the Centerville Court residence where Ms. Jones lives after determining the home was the location that the unauthorized message was sent from.
Agents knocked and called Ms. Jones both announcing the search warrant and encouraging her to cooperate. Ms. Jones refused to come to the door for 20 minutes and hung-up on agents.
After several attempts, Ms. Jones allowed agents inside. Agents entered the home in accordance with normal protocols and seized several devices that will be forensically analyzed. At no time were weapons pointed at anyone in the home. Any evidence will be referred to the State Attorney for prosecution as appropriate.”
That feeds into the “intimidation” theory which is hard to refute, at least for me it is.
…is that you Ron?
Body armor, guns drawn, and a sledgehammer, but it’s not a raid.
Based on your previous statements, that’s not evidence. That’s just a statement by parties who are involved in the event. But it’s not evidence.
Of course it’s not. Someone asked who said it, I was providing an answer.