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Current as of July 7, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.
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COVID-19 Testing Sites - Florida
- Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here
Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step
The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity is now giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program
Access the Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard
Graphs, Charts, and Real Time Tracking of COVID-19
Data Sources
Data Sources on Social Media
Other Resources
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As coronavirus cases continue to increase across the United States, health officials and Democrat politicians seem to be using that statistic to fear monger and justify closure orders.
Dr. Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institute, discussed why we don’t need to be scared of the increase spread of coronavirus on Good Morning San Diego with KUSI’s Paul Rudy.
Atlas said that he has done more than a superficial analysis of the numbers, and after analyzing them, he doesn’t get scared.
Explaining, “When you look all over at the states who are seeing a lot of new cases, you have to look at who is getting infected because we should know by now, that the goal is not to eliminate all cases, that’s not rational, it’s not necessary, if we just protect the people who are going to have serious complications. We look at the cases, yes there’s a lot more cases, by the way they do not correlate in a time sense to any kind of reopening of states. If you look at the timing, that’s just a misstatement, a false narrative. The reality is they may correlate to the new protests and massive demonstrations, but it’s safe to say the majority of new cases are among younger, healthier people.”
Furthermore, Dr. Atlas emphasized the fact that the death rates are not going up, despite the increase in cases. “And that’s what really counts, are we getting people who are really sick and dying, and we’re not, and when we look at the hospitalizations, yes, hospitals are more crowded, but that’s mainly due to the re-installation of medical care for non COVID-19 patients.”
Dr. Atlas used Texas of an example saying, “90+% of ICU beds are occupied, but only 15% are COVID patients. 85% of the occupied beds are not COVID patients. I think we have to look at the data and be aware that it doesn’t matter if younger, healthier people get infected, I don’t know how often that has to be said, they have nearly zero risk of a problem from this. The only thing that counts are the older, more vulnerable people getting infected. And there’s no evidence that they really are.”
Dr. Atlas then pointed out the hospitalization length of stay is about half of what it once was.
Somehow, it became a sign of bedrock conservative principles to refuse to wear a face mask anytime, anyplace, in the middle of a pandemic. Likewise, it's now a marker of devout progressivism to shriek like banshees at anybody who fails to don a mask even for a stroll along a deserted path. Forget health concerns—masks have become signifiers of tribal affiliation.
The politicization of face masks is stupid enough, but research suggests that polarization in the United States has permeated many seemingly unrelated issues, leaving little of life unpolluted by partisanship. Those few who remain outside the scrum may have to bear heavy burdens in the days to come.
"What if polarization is less like a fence getting taller over time and more like an oil spill that spreads from its source to gradually taint more and more previously 'apolitical' attitudes, opinions, and preferences?" writes Pennsylvania State University's Daniel DellaPosta in an study published last month in American Sociological Review.
DellaPosta has been on this beat for a while, co-authoring a 2015 study finding that "as people congregate with the like-minded, they reinforce their shared views, "producing a stereotypical world of 'latte liberals' and 'bird-hunting conservatives.'" That earlier work helped explain the dynamic by which Americans sorting themselves by lifestyle choices that tend to correlate with politics—rural homes for conservatives and urban dwellings for liberals, for example—tend to become more ideologically representative of their chosen communities.
The new study explores evidence that "many initially apolitical lifestyle characteristics, from musical taste to belief in astrology, can become politicized as signals for deeper beliefs and preferences."
For his data, DellaPosta crunched data from the General Social Survey, which is overseen by the University of Chicago and has been compiling information about Americans' opinions since 1972. He found growing evidence not only that Americans are increasingly at odds with one another, but that they've chosen partisan sides over things that have no obvious political content.
Some connections seem to accrete almost accidentally, so that sports and beverage preferences become political signifiers.
"You may have heard politicians referring to 'latte-drinking liberals,' for example, which captures the idea of the oil spill," DellaPosta told Penn State News. "Why should something like drinking a latte become associated with your political ideology?"
As COVID-19 cases surge in the United States, both daily deaths and the crude case fatality rate continue to decline. There are several plausible explanations for those seemingly contradictory trends, including expanded testing that identifies more mild cases, a younger mix of patients, and improved treatment.
Nationwide, the number of newly identified COVID-19 cases hit a record high of more than 57,000 on July 2, up from fewer than 20,000 on Memorial Day. That number had dropped to 44,530 as of yesterday. During that same period, the number of daily deaths, which peaked at 2,749 on April 21, fell from 636 to 251.
Since there is a lag of about two weeks between laboratory confirmation and death, we can expect to see daily fatalities rise during the next few weeks. But they are still likely to be far below the levels recorded in April and early May. The crude case fatality rate in the United States, which exceeded 7 percent in early March, has fallen to 4.5 percent.
In early april, Melvin Hector, a geriatrician in Tucson, Arizona, went into Sapphire of Tucson Nursing and Rehabilitation to check on one of his patients, who had been sent to the hospital the previous day. Hector found the woman in her room, wearing a surgical mask. She had been tested for COVID-19, but the results had not yet come back. When Hector asked for a mask for himself, he says a nurse responded, “We don’t have any.”
“I say to her, ‘You’re going into the room; the other staff are going in the room. She just went out to the hospital for a respiratory disease. And we don’t have any masks in the building?’” Hector recalled in a recent interview.
“They’re on order,” Hector remembered the nurse replying.
When Hector reported the situation to the Arizona Department of Health Services, he said Sapphire ended their working relationship. (In an email to me, Sapphire claimed that it had never suffered shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and that the nurse said she didn’t know where to find more masks, not that there were none. In response to Sapphire’s statement, Hector said, “They lie.”)
To Hector, the episode was a microcosm of the myriad reasons why the United States has suffered so many COVID-19 deaths among nursing-home staff and residents. “Arizona is just one manifestation of a nationwide policy, an administrative policy to ignore this pandemic until it couldn’t be ignored,” Hector told me.
Few places represent the awful consequences of this neglect more than nursing homes. Of the country’s nearly 130,000 coronavirus deaths, more than 40 percent have been residents or employees of nursing homes and long-term care facilities. One in five facilities has reported at least one death. In just one New Jersey nursing home, at least 53 residents died after the sick were housed with the healthy and staffers had little more than rudimentary face shields for protection.
Like so many other effects of the pandemic, the U.S.’s nursing-home COVID-19 crisis is hitting communities of color especially hard. According to research by Tamara Konetzka, a health economist at the University of Chicago, nursing homes with more residents of color were more likely to have a coronavirus case or death.
And yet, state and federal officials seem to be doing little to protect the elderly from further devastation. Coronavirus cases are now surging in Sun Belt states. In recent weeks, deaths in nursing homes have continued to climb in Florida, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and California, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
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he Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index showed dramatic improvement, registering a 52.6 percent reading in June, up from 43.1 percent in May and the first reading above the neutral 50 threshold since February. The June result follows three months in a row in the 40s (see top chart). Overall, the report notes, “June signifies manufacturing entering an expected expansion cycle after the disruption caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Comments from the panel were positive (1.3 positive comments for every one cautious comment), reversing the cautious trend which began in March.”
The composite Purchasing Managers’ Index gain of 9.5 percentage points was a month-over-month rate of change not seen since 1980 while several of the key components of the Purchasing Managers’ Index posted “gains not seen in modern times.” The New Orders Index came in at 56.4 percent, up from 31.8 percent in May, a jump of 24.1 percentage points and the first reading above 50 since January (see top chart). The New Export Orders Index came in at 47.6 percent in June, up 8.1 percentage points from a 39.5 percent result in May. The Backlog-of-Orders Index came in at 45.3 percent in June, up from 38.2 percent in May and suggesting a fourth consecutive month of decline in backlogs. The backlogs index has been below 50 for 13 of the past 14 months.
The Production Index was at 57.3 percent in June, up from 33.2 percent in May and a record-low 27.5 in April. Thirteen industries reported growth in the latest month while three reported contraction.
The Employment Index rose 10.0 percentage points to 42.1 percent in June, versus 32.1 percent in May and 27.5 in April, the lowest reading since June 1949 (see bottom chart). The below-neutral result suggests employment in manufacturing may have fallen again in June. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation report for June is due out on Thursday, July 2 (one day early due to the Independence Day holiday being celebrated on Friday July 3). However, despite the weak reading from the ISM survey, consensus expectations are for a gain of 3 million nonfarm-payroll jobs including the addition of 311,000 jobs in manufacturing. The unemployment rate is expected to fall to 12.3 percent from 13.3 percent in May
The turning point came for me on February 28, 2020, when the New York Times podcast (which used to be my favorite) sent out a piece of panic porn that predicted that the coronavirus would kill 8.25 million Americans, or “six of your friends.”
It came as a shock suddenly to realize that they turned over their main podcast to whipping up a public fear to back a lockdown. Explicitly. This was the agenda. They more or less admitted it. I knew at that moment that the paper had signed up to contribute to a malicious plot to enact an unprecedented social/political experiment.
The Times led the way. Pretty soon, the mainstream media became universally pro-lockdown, probably for political reasons. A widespread and mild virus, dangerous mostly to a particular demographic with low life expectancy and nearly harmless to everyone else, was rendered daily and hourly as a new bubonic plague.
I might have listened for a couple of more days. Then I stopped. The scales fell from my eyes. I decided, suddenly and shockingly for me, to stop filling my head with nonsense. The “news” was not getting me information to help me understand the world; it was clouding my ability to think clearly. A few months later, like clockwork, the revolution at the New York Times was complete when its opinion editor, hired to diversify the opinions in the paper, was unceremoniously fired for diversifying opinion in the paper. (The critical theory crowd has discovered new love for the right of institutions to fire people, contradicting decades of left-wing opposition to the same.)
I started getting my information by digging for it, finding reliable accounts on Twitter to follow, spending my time on statistical pages, and otherwise finding facts, reading history, and educating myself more deeply rather than just trust the media.
An exception here: the Wall Street Journal, which performed heroically throughout.
At this point, I can say that I’m never going back. My addiction to “the news” is over. I’m better off for it. It was painful but I’m glad.
Some readers are now saying: it’s about time. The news has always been about getting eyes and ears and selling advertising. It’s just entertainment. It became especially true with the 24-hour news cycle.
I don’t disagree. I should have given it up years ago. Even now, I can almost immediately tell the difference between a person who watches TV news or listens to mainstream radio vs. those are actually informed about what’s going on.
In any case, I count this as a real victory, courtesy of the lockdown.
Second, I’ve saved a tremendous amount of money from not going to restaurants, bars, and movies. I’m sad for all the places that have closed. It’s unjust and evil. But from my own perspective, I’ve learned to live a good life while spending probably 30% less than I did before. I’ve fallen back in love with cooking, homespun cocktails, and reading.
It’s all to the good. I doubt that I will go back, now that I can make all my favorite meals at a fraction of the price I used to pay. Now that things are opening, I perhaps will make my way out to some restaurants but I doubt I will ever go back to the way things were.
Third,
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Yesterday, Thomas Sowell turned 90. And he is more relevant than ever. Sowell, a frequent contributor to National Review and prodigious scholar, has delivered yet another insightful and accessible book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. It was released on his birthday — a gift from Sowell to the rest of us.
In his new book, Sowell puts primary sources and facts under the powerful microscope of his analysis. His findings are, as is often the case, inconvenient, not to say explosive, truths. Indeed, Charter Schools and Their Enemies documents how non‐white students thrive in charter schools and close the performance gap with their white peers. It’s no surprise, then, that there are long waiting lists to enter charter schools. So why aren’t there more of them? Well, public schools and their teachers’ unions don’t like the competition. This, of course, traps non‐white students in inferior public schools.
Just who is Thomas Sowell and why is he a larger‐than‐life figure in today’s world? Sowell was born on June 30, 1930, in North Carolina. He grew up in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. He earned three economics degrees, one from Harvard (1958), one from Columbia (1959), and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1968). After holding down faculty positions at prestigious universities, Sowell settled at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he has been for the past 40 years.
An indispensable voice over the decades speaks to our present moment.
As Sowell recounts in his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey (2000), he considered himself a Marxist during most of his student years. Chicago put an end to that infatuation. But Sowell’s study of classical economists included the works of Marx, and in 1985 he published Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. As anyone steeped in Marx knows, all symbols of the capitalist, exploitive past must be uprooted and destroyed before a workers’ paradise can be constructed. It turns out that Marxism is of the moment: Yes, the removal of statues and the changing of street and building names is straight out of Marx’s playbook.
But for those who find Marxism too general and abstract to be relevant for the events of today, we direct you to a treasure trove of books in which Sowell has focused his attention on the problems surrounding race and discrimination both in the United States and around the world. To name just a few of his many works specifically on this theme: Race and Economics (1975), Markets and Minorities (1981), Ethnic America: A History (1981), The Economics and Politics of Race (1983), Preferential Policies (1990), Race and Culture (1995), Migrations and Cultures (1996), Conquests and Cultures (1998), Affirmative Action Around the World (2004), Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), Intellectuals and Race (2013), Wealth, Poverty and Politics (2016), and Discrimination and Disparities (2018; rev. ed., 2019).
When analyzing race and discrimination, Sowell relishes going after one of his favorite targets: the intellectual elites, or as he refers to them, “the anointed.” The heart of his message is that men are not born with equal abilities. Contrary to the assertions of the anointed, Sowell argues that “empirically observable skills have always been grossly unequal.” Sowell also argues that not all cultures are equal contributors to world civilization. Indeed, he observes that “differences among racial, national and other groups range from the momentous to the mundane, whether in the United States or in other countries around the world and down through the centuries.” Sowell concludes that the world is culturally complex and filled with variety. We still have little understanding of the causes and consequences of that complexity. But markets tend to harmonize the interests of, or at least minimize the friction between, various peoples and cultures, while politics creates conflict, with advantages for some at the expense of others.
Much of what Sowell has to say about race is contained in his undeniably controversial Black Rednecks and White Liberals, a collection of essays. In the course of a lengthy examination of identity, culture, and its socioeconomic effects, he looks, among other issues, at what he refers to as “black ghetto culture” (something, he stresses more than once, of which “most black Americans” are not a part) and its particular language, customs, behavioral characteristics, and attitudes toward work and leisure. Sowell argues that it has been heavily influenced by earlier white southern “redneck” culture, although, as he is careful to note, this is not a matter of “simple linear extrapolation.” And indeed it is not.
Nonetheless, more and more he focused on issues of race and ethnicity, here and around the world. That is true of his many books and articles and his long-time syndicated column. In doing so, Sowell drew a distinction between race and culture, becoming one of the leading proponents of the concept of a “culture of poverty.” This was not an entirely new concept, of course. It was, for instance, one of the primary conclusions of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 report on The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. (Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, March 1965, Chapter 2): “There is considerable evidence that the Negro community is in fact dividing between a stable middle class group that is steadily growing stronger and more successful, and an increasingly disorganized and disadvantaged lower class group.”
Sowell, like Moynihan, distinguished between culture or class, and race. A race comprises different classes or cultures. This is as true for whites as for blacks. Sowell in fact wrote about why the black and white underclasses exhibit similar pathologies: because they share a common culture. (Black Rednecks and White Liberals [Encounter Books, 2005]). In Sowell’s view many of the problems facing inner cities are not tied to race, but culture. The same, he points out, is true for poor, Appalachian whites, as writers such as J. D. Vance and Nancy Isenberg have explored more recently. These cultural issues were exacerbated by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which vastly expanded the modern welfare state as part of its War on Poverty. Sowell pointed out that welfare, untied from work or marriage, created incentives that undermined the black family. The welfare system established means-tested payments to low-income mothers with children that required the absence of a father and breadwinner. In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today, according to Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution, 75 percent of black families have no father present. There is no social program imaginable, nor sum of money, that can make up for the disadvantages the children of single parents will suffer compared to children with two parents.
Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) recently underscored this point. Citing Sowell, he said that “If you have two parents in the household, you reduce poverty in the African-American community by 85%. That’s a stunning truth that needs more oxygen.” (Wall Street Journal, June 20-21, 2020).
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Chalk the Philly landmark’s famous blemish up to faulty building materials from across the pond. In 1751, the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly shelled out 100 pounds to London’s Whitechapel Bell Foundry for a bell to hang in the State House (known post-Revolution as Independence Hall). The Whitechapel Bell Foundry—famous for casting Big Ben a century later and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as Great Britain’s oldest manufacturing company—dropped the ball on the bell, casting it with too-brittle metals.
When the bell arrived in Philadelphia in 1752, it cracked on its first test strike. Two local craftsmen, John Pass and John Stow, twice cast a new bell using metal from the cracked English bell. They also added more copper, to make the bell less brittle, and silver, to sweeten its tone. The recast behemoth weighed in at 2,000 pounds: 70 percent copper, 25 percent tin, and a scattering of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and arsenic.
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Light drinking may protect brain function
UGA study shows that for older people it could help cognitive condition
Light to moderate drinking may preserve brain function in older age, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.
The study examined the link between alcohol consumption and changes in cognitive function over time among middle-aged and older adults in the U.S.
“We know there are some older people who believe that drinking a little wine everyday could maintain a good cognitive condition,” said lead author Ruiyuan Zhang, a doctoral student at UGA’s College of Public Health.
“We wanted to know if drinking a small amount of alcohol actually correlates with a good cognitive function, or is it just a kind of survivor bias.”
Regular, moderate alcohol consumption has been shown to promote heart health and some research points to a similar protective benefit for brain health. However, many of these studies were not designed to isolate the effects of alcohol on cognition or did not measure effects over time.
Zhang and his team developed a way to track cognition performance over 10 years using participant data from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study.
During the study, a total of 19,887 participants completed surveys every two years about their health and lifestyle, including questions on drinking habits. Light to moderate drinking is defined as fewer than eight drinks per week for women and 15 drinks or fewer per week among men.
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Many millions of people have spent the last four months in sadness and depression. It’s hard to watch the world shattered by the bad behavior of governments – and to see too many among us cheer the destruction – and not feel a sense of despair.
And yet the human mind is an incredible thing. If we work at it, we can figure out a good takeaway from terrible events. Doing so – it takes effort – can brighten the spirits and point the way forward out of the morass.
I’ve taken three positives out of this experience.
First, I’m completely over my decades-old addiction to news. I always loved the news, even from when I was a kid. For years, I read the Washington Post with my morning coffee. Then I switched to the New York Times, and learned how to tease truth out of their biased but comprehensive coverage. Then I added the Wall Street Journal. When home assistants came along, I programmed mine to play 8 hours (if I needed it) of nonstop news: BBC, NPR, NYT, and so many others. It felt like such a luxury.
The turning point came for me on February 28, 2020, when the New York Times podcast (which used to be my favorite) sent out a piece of panic porn that predicted that the coronavirus would kill 8.25 million Americans, or “six of your friends.”
It came as a shock suddenly to realize that they turned over their main podcast to whipping up a public fear to back a lockdown. Explicitly. This was the agenda. They more or less admitted it. I knew at that moment that the paper had signed up to contribute to a malicious plot to enact an unprecedented social/political experiment.
The Times led the way. Pretty soon, the mainstream media became universally pro-lockdown, probably for political reasons. A widespread and mild virus, dangerous mostly to a particular demographic with low life expectancy and nearly harmless to everyone else, was rendered daily and hourly as a new bubonic plague.
I might have listened for a couple of more days. Then I stopped. The scales fell from my eyes. I decided, suddenly and shockingly for me, to stop filling my head with nonsense. The “news” was not getting me information to help me understand the world; it was clouding my ability to think clearly. A few months later, like clockwork, the revolution at the New York Times was complete when its opinion editor, hired to diversify the opinions in the paper, was unceremoniously fired for diversifying opinion in the paper. (The critical theory crowd has discovered new love for the right of institutions to fire people, contradicting decades of left-wing opposition to the same.)
I started getting my information by digging for it, finding reliable accounts on Twitter to follow, spending my time on statistical pages, and otherwise finding facts, reading history, and educating myself more deeply rather than just trust the media.
An exception here: the Wall Street Journal, which performed heroically throughout.
At this point, I can say that I’m never going back. My addiction to “the news” is over. I’m better off for it. It was painful but I’m glad.
Some readers are now saying: it’s about time. The news has always been about getting eyes and ears and selling advertising. It’s just entertainment. It became especially true with the 24-hour news cycle.
I don’t disagree. I should have given it up years ago. Even now, I can almost immediately tell the difference between a person who watches TV news or listens to mainstream radio vs. those are actually informed about what’s going on.
In any case, I count this as a real victory, courtesy of the lockdown.
Second, I’ve saved a tremendous amount of money from not going to restaurants, bars, and movies. I’m sad for all the places that have closed. It’s unjust and evil. But from my own perspective, I’ve learned to live a good life while spending probably 30% less than I did before. I’ve fallen back in love with cooking, homespun cocktails, and reading.
It’s all to the good. I doubt that I will go back, now that I can make all my favorite meals at a fraction of the price I used to pay. Now that things are opening, I perhaps will make my way out to some restaurants but I doubt I will ever go back to the way things were.
Third,
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