Rebekah Jones, the architect and onetime manager of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard, said on Monday she was removed from her post after she would not censor data.
In an email to CBS12 News, Jones said she refused to "manually change data to drum up support" for Florida's plan to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic. The dashboard shares data on coronavirus cases, testing, and deaths by county and ZIP code, and is used by the public and academic and private researchers working on coronavirus models. Jones led a team of Florida Department of Health data scientists and public health officials to create the dashboard, which was praised last month by Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House coronavirus task force.
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