Note: Please do not reply to this email as replies will not be reviewed. If you have a question or comment, click here.
Current as of Sept. 9, 2020, at 7:00 a.m.
COVID-19 Testing Sites in 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 giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program: View DEO Dashboard Here.

Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard: Access dashboard here.

Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19

Data Sources

Data Sources on Social Media

Other Resources
Current Statistics

  • Fatality rate in Florida - 1.9%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .07%
  • 35-44 years old - .21%
  • 45-54 years old - .48%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.5%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.1%
  • 75 and up - 16.3%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 40 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 24% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 25%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 28%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: September 2, 2020 10:16 PM PST

210
vaccines are in development.

30
are now in clinical testing.

Tuesday's report from the Florida Department of Health showed the state added 1,823 new COVID-19 cases for Sept. 7.

That's now the fewest number of new coronavirus cases added in a day's report since mid-June. And, it brings the total number of cases statewide to 650,092 since March. 

The median age of Floridians testing positive for the virus is 40.

The health department also reported another 44 Floridians had died after testing positive for coronavirus, bringing the total to 11,915 Floridians and 152 non-residents who have died since the pandemic began.

Those numbers do not necessarily mean those people died Monday but rather the state learned of their deaths and added the numbers to the report that day. The state's line-by-line report, which you can read here, lists coronavirus deaths by the date the people tested positive for the virus, not the date they passed. 

However, the state recently added a section to its daily report (on page 5) that shows deaths by date of death. This data has been reported daily on Florida's COVID-19 dashboard.

The graph for deaths by date of death is subject to change, though, because the information reported to the state can be delayed up to two weeks. So, for consistency, our charts have stuck to new deaths added by the date they were added. For transparency, you can always reference the state's data here.

As for the latest on testing, the health department reported 4.96 percent of 40,893 test results returned from labs were positive for COVID-19 through Sept. 7.

When it comes to hospitalizations, 3,172 people were hospitalized with coronavirus as their primary diagnosis as of 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. Of those, 581 patients were in the Tampa Bay area.

A total of 40,195 people in Florida have been hospitalized with COVID-19 at some point during the pandemic.

Breaking down the numbers

For the month of August, daily reported COVID-19 cases in Florida remained under 10,000. And, for more than a week, daily new cases were under 4,000. 

That changed with the report for Aug. 31. A backlog of nearly 75,000 test results from Quest Diagnostics was added to that day's report, which resulted in 7,569 new cases reported. Failure to report those test results earlier, most of which were more than two weeks old, with some dating all the way back to April, caused the Department of Health to sever all ties with Quest, according to the state.

Florida on Aug. 22 became the second state to cross the 600,000 reported COVID-19 cases mark. As of Sept. 3, California has had more than 721,000 cases. Texas has about 641,800 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University & Medicine.

On Aug. 31, the United States passed 6 million coronavirus cases, the highest recorded number in the world, according to the Associated Press. That's a little more than three weeks after the country surpassed 5 million confirmed coronavirus cases on Aug. 9. 

The highest single-day case number Florida has reported so far is 15,300 for July 11. However, Florida has not reported a single-day new case number at or higher than 10,000 since late July.

And, the report from the state showed 1,838 new cases were confirmed on Sept. 6, the fewest in a day since mid-June.

The state's report released on Aug. 11 of 277 newly confirmed deaths was the highest seen from the state in a single day's report. The previous record was 257 from the July 31 report.

The World Health Organization and infectious disease experts around the globe have recommended a positivity rate of 5 percent or lower for a 14-day span in order to be comfortable reopening. 

Until Aug. 21, Florida had not seen a positivity rate at 5 percent since the beginning of June. In July, the state reported positivity rates at double and even triple that recommended percentage.

The reports for Aug. 1 and 2, respectively, showed positivity rates below 10 percent for the first time since June 24. In August, the state reported a positivity rate above 10 percent five times.

The positivity rate reported for Sept. 6 (4.55 percent) is the lowest Florida has seen since mid-June.

Florida remains in Phase Two of reopening, which began June 5.

Hospitalizations and ICU bed availability

Cases are climbing, but what about hospitalizations?

Tracking hospitalizations got easier on July 10 when the Agency for Health Care Administration began publishing a spreadsheet with the number of people currently checked-in for coronavirus-related complications in Florida. The data only includes people whose "primary diagnosis" was COVID-19.

As of 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, 3,172 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 as their primary diagnosis statewide, and 581 of them were in the Tampa Bay area. Those numbers are frequently updated, and you can click here for the most recent data, which is also broken down by county.

Since the pandemic began, the state confirms a total of 40,195 residents were hospitalized at some point during their illness.

The Agency for Healthcare Administration (AHCA) also updates total hospital bed and ICU availability by county...


Were the lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.

Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I noted in May, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 75,000 and 116,000 people in the United States, between 0.04% and 0.07% of the nation’s population then. The 1968-69 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05% of the population.

The current death toll of 185,000 is 0.055% of the current population. It will go higher, but it’s about the same magnitude as those two flu outbreaks and less deadly for those under 65. Yet, there were no statewide lockdowns, no massive school closings, no closed office buildings and factories, restaurants, and museums. No one even considered shutting down Woodstock.

Why are attitudes so different today? Perhaps we have greater confidence in the government’s effectiveness. If public policy can affect climate change, it can stamp out a virus.

Plus, we’re much more risk-averse. Children aren’t allowed to walk to school, jungle gyms have vanished from playgrounds, and college students are shielded from microaggressions. We have a “safetyism mindset,”as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write in The Coddling of the American Mind, under which “many aspects of students’ lives needed to be carefully regulated by adults, and that it was far better to overreact to potential risks and threats than to underreact.”

So, the news of the coronavirus killing dozens and overloading hospitals in Bergamo, Italy, triggered a flight to safety and restriction. Many people stopped going to restaurants and shops even before the lockdowns were ordered in March and April. The exaggerated projections of some epidemiologists, with a professional interest in forecasting pandemics, triggered demands that governments act.

The legitimate fears that hospitals would be overwhelmed apparently explain the (in retrospect, deadly) orders of the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan requiring elderly care facilities to admit coronavirus-infected patients. And the original purpose to “flatten the curve” segued into “stamp out the virus.”

But the apparent success in this venture by a few nations that enjoy some degree of geographic isolation (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand) could never be replicated in a continent-sized and globalized nation such as the U.S.

Governors imposing continued lockdowns claimed to be “following the science.” But they followed it in only one dimension — that of reducing the immediate number of COVID-19 cases. There was no care taken for other dimensions of life — for example, the lockdowns also prevented cancer screenings, heart attack treatments, and substance abuse counseling, whose absence resulted in a large but hard-to-estimate number of deaths. What Haidt and Lukianoff call “vindictive protectiveness” turned out to be not very protective after all.

Examples of "vindictive protectiveness" include the shaming of beachgoers (even though outdoor virus spread is minimal), the extension of school close-downs (even though few children get or transmit the infection), the closing down of gardening aisles in superstores, and the banning of church services (even when inevitably noisy and crowded demonstrations for politically favored causes are given the green light).

The new thinking on lockdowns, as Greg Ip reported in the Wall Street Journal last week, is that “they’re overly blunt and costly.” That supports President Trump’s mid-April statement that "a prolonged lockdown combined with a forced economic depression would inflict an immense and wide-ranging toll on public health.”

For many, that economic damage has been absolute or nearly so. Restaurants and small businesses have been closed forever, even before the last three months of “mostly peaceful” urban rioting. Losses have been concentrated on those with low incomes and little wealth, whereas the lockdowns have added tens of billions to the net worths of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Attitudes on lockdowns are highly correlated with partisan politics.

Democrats tend to be more risk-averse and want lockdowns continued until there’s a vaccine. Republicans are less risk-averse and want most restrictions lifted.

As a result, since governors and mayors make these decisions, it’s heavily Democratic central cities (New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco) whose civic fabric is being rent and cultural capital is left in ruins, with much less devastation in the exurbs and the countryside.

This fouling-your-own-nest extends to voting. Many more Democrats than Republicans want to vote by mail, even though the risk of voter error or non-counting of their vote is higher than for those, most of them Republicans, who want to vote in person.

The anti-lockdown blogger (and former New York Times reporter) Alex Berenson makes a powerful case that lockdowns delayed rather than prevented infections and that current plunging hospitalization and death rates suggest we’re approaching herd immunity, where the virus fades out for lack of new targets.

There are old lessons here, ready to be relearned. Governments can sometimes channel, but never entirely control, nature. There is no way to eliminate risk entirely. Attempts to reduce one risk may increase others. Amid uncertainty, people make mistakes. Like, maybe, the lockdowns.

While a majority of Americans still view the coronavirus pandemic as mostly a health crisis, more people are seeing it primarily as an economic crisis, according to a new poll.

A NBC|SurveyMonkey Weekly Tracking Poll released Tuesday indicates more Americans are beginning to worry about how long it is taking for businesses to reopen amid the pandemic.

Poll results show:
  • 52% of Americans say the coronavirus pandemic is predominantly a health crisis.
  • 47% of Americans say the pandemic is more of an economic crisis.
  • 54% of Americans say it is a bigger concern that businesses are reopening too quickly compared to 42% of people who say they are worried that businesses aren’t opening fast enough.

Even though health concerns are still ahead of economic worries, according to the poll results, more Americans are expressing concerns over the toll the virus has taken on the economy compared to poll results from a survey conducted in early July.

According to an early July poll, 63% of Americans viewed businesses reopening too quickly as the bigger concern, compared to 33% who said they were more worried about slower reopenings.

Results from the early July poll found that 56% of Americans said they saw the pandemic as more of a health crisis, while 43% reported they viewed it as more of an economic crisis.

The poll surveyed 35,847 adults between Aug. 31-Sept. 6. The margin of error is plus or minus 1 percentage point.

When Covid-19 struck, the U.S. was already in the grip of an expanding drug-overdose crisis. It has only gotten worse since then.

Counties in states spanning the country, from Washington to Arizona and Florida, are reporting rising drug fatalities this year, according to data collected by The Wall Street Journal. This follows a likely record number of deadly overdoses in the U.S. last year, with more than 72,000 people killed, according to federal projections.

The pandemic has destabilized people trying to maintain sobriety or who are struggling with addiction during a time of increased social isolation and stress, according to treatment providers and public-health authorities. In a survey of U.S. adults released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13% of respondents in June said they had started or increased substance use to deal with stress or emotions related to Covid-19.

The drug deaths are adding to the pandemic’s toll, which includes more than 188,000 infection-related fatalities, but also other deaths linked to factors such as disruptions in health care and economic dislocation.

“It’s a pretty stark reality here,” said David Sternberg, clinical-services manager at the nonprofit group HIPS in Washington, D.C., which helps keep drug users safe and find treatment. “We’ve lost a lot of clients, a lot of patients.”

Moreover, social-distancing limitations are complicating treatment for people who struggle with addiction and for the organizations that provide services to them.

Benjamin Kief died of an opioid overdose on April 7 while in his car in West Chester, Pa. After serving time for a parole violation, the 30-year-old left a state prison in late March, when the pandemic was ramping up. He struggled to get an appointment with a recovery coach, said his mother, Mary Kief. He also wanted to start attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings, but they weren’t gathering in person due to stay-at-home orders and online video meetings made him anxious, she said.

“We had all these plans set up,” Ms. Kief said. But because of the pandemic, she said, “he didn’t have the resources.”

Drug-treatment providers say the federal government has helped amid the pandemic by loosening restrictions to make it easier to access addiction medication remotely, and are using telemedicine to reach people in need where possible. But people in recovery also often rely on in-person support services like group meetings, advocates say.

The Journal, through data and public-records requests, asked the 50 largest counties by population for information on overdoses this year. Among the 30 that provided numbers, 21 of them showed overdose deaths trending up from last year. Among the other jurisdictions, several had only prepandemic data, and some said overdose tallies were flat or trending lower.

Federal overdose data has yet to catch up to the pandemic months.
Counties in Nevada, California, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and Michigan are among those showing increases. Authorities in other places, including traditional hot spots for opioid deaths like parts of Appalachia and New England, are also reporting more drug deaths.

The spread of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, and increased use of methamphetamines were contributing to the worsening overdose problem before the pandemic. Many counties and states say the pandemic is amplifying the threat from these drugs.

The Southern Nevada Health District, which covers Clark County, including Las Vegas, said fentanyl fueled an 8% increase in fatal drug overdoses for the first half of this year. Authorities in San Diego also said fentanyl is killing more people there.

In Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, overdoses rose 48% to 247 in the first month and a half of the pandemic compared with the same period a year earlier, said Gary Tsai, interim director of substance abuse prevention and control for the county’s public health department.

“They’re indoors, they’re stressed, maybe they lost a job or a family member,” Mr. Tsai said of the added stress factors some drug users face.

Early figures show that the overdose tally in Ohio’s Franklin County, which includes Columbus, reached 580 by late August, said county coroner Anahi Ortiz. That is near the entire total reported for 2019.

“I don’t think it would have been this high a number if Covid-19 hadn’t hit us,” Dr. Ortiz said. “We’re seeing a lot more relapses.”

Suspected overdoses rose almost 18% after stay-at-home orders were implemented across the country in mid-March, compared with the early 2020 period before the pandemic struck, according to data from the Overdose Detection Mapping ApplicationProgram, which collects real-time overdose numbers nationally.

Opioid users are typically advised against using drugs alone since that boosts the risk they could die without someone nearby to revive them with an overdose-reversal drug like naloxone.

Tanna Welch’s 35-year-old daughter, Holly Carver, died from a fentanyl overdose in late April while alone in her room at a group home outside Seattle, Ms. Welch said. The mother of three had completed a treatment program in February. But she had struggled with drug use for many years, in part to manage untreated mental illness, and the combination of her self-medicating, the dangers of fentanyl and the pandemic proved overwhelming.

“It was three converging storms, and it was just too much for her,” Ms. Welch said.

Shannon Hicks, who heads the West Virginia harm-reduction group Exchange Union, said she has seen a jump in overdoses.

“When Covid hit, nobody was allowed to touch anybody, nobody was allowed to see anybody,” Ms. Hicks said. “The worst thing for someone chaotically using drugs is to be isolated.”

The pandemic has also disrupted the supply of illegal drugs flowing up from the U.S.-Mexico border, possibly because restricted border traffic makes it harder for traffickers to move product inconspicuously, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. These supply interruptions can heighten risks for users who seek new dealers and buy unfamiliar products.

“You can’t get the drug you’re used to getting, so you get your hands on whatever you can,” said Gavin Bart, who directs the addiction medicine division at Hennepin Healthcare, a safety-net hospital in Minneapolis.

The intensifying drug crisis is particularly crushing for advocates who celebrated a slight decline in drug deaths in 2018, which marked the first time in nearly three decades the U.S. death toll hadn’t risen. In the past decade alone, overdoses have killed more than a half-million Americans.

“I feel like all the work we did reducing overdoses just got tossed out the window,” said Jess Tilley, co-founder of the harm-reduction group HRH413 in western Massachusetts.