Science reports said obscured in reopening  debate

As the debate over how to reopen safely rages on, scientists in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona have said their state governments have tried to obscure data that doesn’t conform to their plans say media reports. 

Rebekah Jones, an official at the Florida Department of Public Health who ran the state’s well-regarded coronavirus dashboard, told her colleagues on Friday. May 22  that she had been removed from her role for “reasons beyond my division’s control.” She later told a reporter that the state had asked her to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen.”

State officials in Arizona ordered researchers at two major universities to pause their work on modeling projections for coronavirus cases and stop releasing the data sets they were producing, according to a copy of the order seen by BuzzFeed News. And in Georgia, which was one of the first states to begin reopening in late June, data released by officials has repeatedly contained errors that appeared to suggest fewer people were getting sick in the lead-up to the reopening, critics say.