Now a private citizen, Jones continues to take issue with the way the state is calculating its coronavirus positivity rate. The official Florida site says there are more than 1.3 million "total people tested" in Florida, of which about 73,500 were positive, resulting in an "overall percent positive" rate of 5.4%.
But Jones says that figure is misleading.
"I actually wrote the script to create that data, so I know exactly what it looks like," she says, adding that she's audited it and checked it with several other statisticians to make sure it's correct.
She says that on the state's dashboard, any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus.
Jones says that because many residents, such as health care workers, require repeated testing, the state's dashboard is artificially deflating the true positivity rate.
