'Messing with the truth': Florida COVID test centers reporting 100% positivity

PALM BEACH, Florida -- In what is being termed a "huge scandal" in connection with the coronavirus, countless testing centers for COVID-19 across Florida are reporting a 100% positivity rate, which would mean every single person tested was positive.

FOX 35 News in Orlando was the first to break the scandal, noting the station "investigated these astronomical numbers, contacting every local location mentioned in the report. The report showed that Orlando Health had a 98 percent positivity rate. However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health's positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report."

The Florida Department of Health told FOX 35 "that although private and public laboratories are required to report positive and negative results to the state immediately, some have not. Specifically, they said that some smaller, private labs were not reporting negative test result data to the state."

Soldiers with the Florida National Guard work with the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department to test residents for COVID-19 at a walk-up testing site at the Bob Hayes Sports Complex and Legends Center in Jacksonville, Florida, May 9, 2020. The site allows those without vehicles to get tested. (Photo by Army Sgt. Michael Baltz)

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U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla, told the Fox News Channel the labs fudging the numbers are "messing with the truth."

"If you have some of these labs not reporting the negatives, only reporting the positives, skewing these numbers ... they're messing with the truth," Mast told FNC.

"They're not allowing information that allows Americans to manage their own risk, manage their own health and make the decisions that they need to make."

Radio host Rush Limbaugh was outraged by the lack of national coverage of this "huge scandal" of misreporting Florida results.

"More than 300 COVID testing labs – I'm gonna say this again – more than 300 COVID testing labs in Florida reported 100% positivity rates," Limbaugh said Wednesday on his national broadcast. "That simply isn't possible. Every person they tested was reported as positive."

"The actual number's 10 times lower. That drastically changes the news out of Florida in terms of the number of cases. A huge story. Now, why would the Democrats care? They had a bad news Florida narrative, and that's all that mattered. They got a bad news narrative out of every state that they need."

Rush Limbaugh (video screenshot courtesy RushLimbaugh.com)

"The horses are out of the barn now," Limbaugh continued. "Everybody thinks that Florida is ground zero, that it's the new hot spot, that everybody in Florida's getting sick and they're all gonna die. That's the desired effect all this is having. Folks, we have been intentionally misled about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine. We have been misinformed on the effectiveness of masks.

"Early on information was withheld about nursing home deaths. There's still no accountability for the people involved in that scandal, such as Governor Cuomo. Fatality rates by age-group are difficult to find. Alleged infectious rates are screaming headlines, but hospitalization and fatalities are buried, not reported. And now we can't even have an honest discussion about sending kids back to school because all the data we're dealing with is flawed. It's corrupted. For crying out loud, 300 testing centers in Florida report 100 percent positive rates."

The Sunshine State has been making headlines recently for its supposed upward spike in COVID-19 cases. Florida reported 15,300 new cases on Sunday, and then on Monday, another 12,624, the second-highest statewide increase.

Two women walk along the Atlantic Ocean shore in Jensen Beach, Florida, on May 7, 2020 (Photo by Joe Kovacs)

Limbaugh noted: "You know what's really sick? What's really sick is the Democrats cheered what they saw massive positivity results in Florida. The media was happy about it. It was great news. It was bad for Trump, don't you see? It gave them an additional opportunity to spread this narrative that Trump is incompetent, that Trump doesn't know how to lead during a pandemic, that Trump doesn't care, that Trump just trying to ignore it.

"Trump is trying to inspire people to be adults about this and realize that we can do a whole bunch of things at the same time, that we do not allow ourselves to get trapped and paralyzed by fear. But we have been. Fear is paralyzing people. And we find out now that the source of the fear is not true. It is flawed. The data is not being reported to us accurately and honestly."

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