Since the beginning of this year, Florida has experienced an uptick in the number of pneumonia and influenza deaths, according to data from the Centers for Disease and Control.

According to the data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, since the beginning of the year there has been a total of 1,519 deaths in Florida where pneumonia and influenza were listed as the underlying cause.

Bob Anderson, the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch in CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told The Daily Beast that the increase of deaths in Florida where pneumonia and influenza were the underlying cause was “statistically significant” and that those mortalities were “probably COVID cases that weren’t reported as such.” The coronavirus can cause lung complications such as pneumonia.

But officials, including Anderson, do believe that a portion of the pneumonia and influenza deaths in Florida involved patients who were infected with, but never tested for, COVID-19.

“[In Florida] most likely what we’re seeing are folks dying without having been tested and the best evidence that the doctors or whoever is filling out the death certificate had pointed to the person dying of pneumonia.”.

Anderson added that the numbers currently reflected on the CDC’s website for pneumonia and influenza deaths for 2020 are lower than reality because the death certificate reporting system lags by several weeks, especially in states that do not have digitized systems to process the papers. .

Earlier this month the DeSantis administration fired Rebekah Jones, the data manager for the Florida Department of Health who worked on the state’s coronavirus online dashboard.

In a statement posted to her website, Jones said she was removed from her position because she pushed back when officials in the health department asked her to “manipulate and delete data in late April as work for the state’s reopening plan started to take off.” The DeSantis administration has since said Jones was fired for insubordination.

With Florida already under a national microscope, news of the state’s pneumonia fatalities circulated on social media this week as liberals accused DeSantis and members of his administration of manipulating data and deliberately downplaying the number of coronavirus deaths.

But Anderson said it is unlikely that a physician with a patient who tested positive for the coronavirus would have marked anything other than COVID-19 as the underlying cause on the death certificate.

That scenario would have likely played out in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak when testing was difficult to access and when physicians were still learning how the coronavirus presented itself, Anderson said.

The emergence of the coronavirus strained the reporting system in a way that has led to a significant national undercounting, Anderson said, adding that the death-certificate count usually lags anywhere from two to eight weeks.