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Current as of July 8, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.

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

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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


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The northeastern United States was badly ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic. The five states with the highest Covid-19 deaths per capita to date are New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island; if the District of Columbia were a state, it would place sixth. It is generally believed that public policies on social distancing, face coverings, contact tracing, and quarantine are critical in preventing Covid-19 deaths. One imagines that state governments with access to the best public-health, medical, and political-science expertise would craft the best such policies. One might also imagine that wealthier state governments would exercise such policies most robustly.

How surprising, then, to learn that the DC, Massachusetts, and the New York City metro area boast the highest-income citizenries in the nation. Why did these areas, these national centers of government power (Washington), financial might (New York City), and academic prestige (Boston) do so poorly? It is a truism that it’s easier to spot the speck in someone else’s eye than the log in your own; we have seen elite publications from each of these cultural capitals charge that poor, southern, and red states were committing their citizens to slaughter by not following the policy dictates of the northeastern mandarins, even as those policies seemingly failed.

On April 21, the Washington Post called Georgia “America’s No. 1 Death Destination.” On April 29, The Atlantic declared the state’s early reopening an “Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” On April 30, The New York Times was a bit stodgier, saying merely that Georgia had “Screwed Up.” After two months, though, Georgia remains open, and its Covid death rate stands at 27.2 per 100,000—well below the U.S. average of 39.7 per 100,000, and eight times lower than the state of New Jersey.

This past weekend, the Times declared that Texas had “Swaggered into a Coronavirus Disaster.” The rate of death from Covid-19 in Texas is nine times less than in the state of New York, and 30 times less than the death rate of New York City. Clearly, the elite media and its professional analysts profoundly misunderstand key aspects of the pandemic. Why do they keep getting the wrong answers on Covid-19 policy, and what prevents them from making course corrections after two months of data contradict their predictions?

Four months ago, based on my experience as a Canadian intensive-care unit physician, I argued in a British publication that lockdowns could not really prevent Covid from infecting a proportion of the population, but merely delay it. That proportion would be the “herd-immunity threshold”—the percentage beyond which the virus would run out of fresh hosts. Covid-19 causes death almost exclusively in the elderly and people with significant medical comorbidities. Out of more than 18,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths in New York City, only 28 were in healthy people under 45. Absent an effective vaccine or transformative treatment, and given the economic devastation of long-term lockdowns, why not focus public-health efforts going forward on the vulnerable, and allow young healthy people to resume life, taking certain precautions? This is what Georgia has done. Governor Brian Kemp lifted the statewide lockdown on April 30 but ordered persons over 65 and the “medically fragile” to continue sheltering in place. This policy continued until June 11, when healthy elders were let out. Indeed, cases of Covid-19 have been increasing in Georgia since about June 11, with a rapid upward inflection of the curve coincident with ongoing Black Lives Matter street protests and increased testing capacity. If these new cases are found predominantly in young healthy people, or are a function of increased testing rates, we may hope that they will not yield an increase in daily Covid-19 deaths—and bring the state closer to herd immunity.


New York and New Jersey have had more than 44,000 deaths above normal from mid-March to May, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the C.D.C. While Covid-19 is the leading cause of these excess deaths, more people have also died from other causes like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease in recent weeks than for the same period in previous years.

Public health experts have said that many of these additional deaths from other causes may be undercounts or misdiagnoses of Covid-19, or indirectly linked to the pandemic otherwise.

Here is a breakdown of excess deaths in the two states, which together account for more than 40 percent of the official coronavirus death toll in the United States. All numbers in the accompanying charts are rounded down, either to the nearest hundred, or if below 100, to the nearest 10. Totals for the three areas are rounded down from the exact sum.

Covid-19 makes up more than 60 percent of excess deaths so far.

According to the C.D.C., about 30,500 deaths were directly attributed to Covid-19 from March 15 to May 2, the period for which the most recent comprehensive data is available. About half of those deaths were in New York City alone.

But more deaths have also been caused by conditions that are common comorbidities with Covid-19.

Heart disease — the leading cause of death in the United States — saw a large surge in excess deaths over the same time. In New York City, deaths from heart disease were nearly three times the normal.


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.

Are these positive trends an illusion created by looking at nationwide averages rather than what is going on in the states where cases are rising dramatically? To some extent, yes. Daily deaths are rising in those states, but not nearly as much as you would expect if COVID-19 were killing patients as frequently as it did earlier in the epidemic.

In Texas, newly confirmed cases rose 13-fold, from 623 to 8,258, between May 25 and July 4 before falling to 3,449 yesterday. The number had risen six-fold as of two weeks ago, and by now that increase should be having an impact on daily deaths. Yet the rolling seven-day average of daily deaths has risen only modestly since Memorial Day, from 26 to 32. Meanwhile, the crude case fatality rate for Texas, which peaked at 3.4 percent on April 30, has continued to fall, reaching 0.5 percent yesterday.

"So far," The New York Times notes, "the death toll has not climbed much in Texas and other parts of the South and West seeing a surge." Even taking into account the increase in cases during the last two weeks, Youyang Gu's epidemiological model projects that daily deaths in Texas will rise to a peak of 64 in mid-to-late August before declining to 52 by the end of September. That's a substantial increase but not at all commensurate with the spike in cases.


Difficult circumstances are said to bring people together. But, if anything, COVID-19 has widened political and cultural fracture lines in the U.S., giving us more to fight over and less reason to trust each other in times to come.

In an election year dominated by two worn-out, mutually loathing legacy political parties, there's no reason to think any of these tensions will be resolved by the outcome of the vote.

Sorted by culture, lifestyle, and political affiliation into two dominant tribes—"red" Republicans and "blue" Democrats—most Americans have declining contact with those outside their own camp, less in common with those who live differently, and slumping opinions of one another to match. Urban and suburban blues disdain those who don't share their values, politics, and way of life, and rural and exurban reds return the sentiment.

Last year, U.S. News & World Report pointed out that "Democrats and Republicans don't just disagree, they hate each other." Sad to say, the polling bears that out.

The Institute for Supply Management’s nonmanufacturing index posted a record 11.7 percentage-point increase in June, rising to a reading of 57.1 from 45.4 in the prior month. The June result follows two consecutive months below the neutral 50 threshold including a record monthly decline in April (see top chart). The results suggest expansion for the services sector and the broader economy. They are also consistent with other signs of an emerging rebound, coming amid efforts to ease government-imposed restrictions on people and businesses implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19. However, the emerging rebound is at risk as new cases of COVID-19 surge around the country and policymakers consider slowing the easing of lockdown restrictions or even possibly reinstating some forms of lockdown requirements.

Among the key components of the nonmanufacturing index, the business-activity index (comparable to the production index in the ISM manufacturing report) surged to 66.0 in June, up from 41.0 in May and 26.0 in April (the lowest reading since the survey began in 1997, see top chart). The June result is the highest since January 2004. For June, 15 industries in the nonmanufacturing survey reported expansion versus 1 reporting contraction.

The nonmanufacturing new-orders index rose to 61.6 from 41.9 in May and 32.9 in April (see bottom chart). Fifteen industries reported expansion in new orders in June while just one reported contraction. The new-export-orders index, a separate index that measures only orders for export, was 58.9 in June, versus 51.4 in May and 36.3 in April (the lowest since November 2008.) Seven industries reported growth in export orders, equaling the seven industries reporting declines.

The nonmanufacturing employment index came in at 43.1 in June, up from 31.8 in May and 30.0 in April. Employment remains one of the weaker areas of the economy despite the large gain in jobs reported in the June jobs report.

Supplier deliveries, a measure of delivery times for suppliers to nonmanufacturers, came in at 57.5, down from 67.0 in the prior month and 78.3 in April. It suggests suppliers are falling further behind in delivering supplies to nonmanufacturers, though the slippage has decelerated from the prior two months. Typically, slower deliveries are consistent with a strong economy but in this environment, the slower deliveries are a result of production constraints and transportation difficulties, not strong economic conditions.


The Trump administration on Monday disclosed the names of many small businesses which received loans under a program intended to blunt the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic.

The disclosure comes amid demands from Democrats for more transparency around the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, funds established as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act, which President Donald Trump signed this spring.

[The full list is available on the Small Business Administration website, which you can access here .]


U.S. services industry activity rebounded sharply in June, almost returning to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels, but a resurgence in coronavirus cases that has forced some restaurants and bars to close again threatens the emerging recovery.

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said on Monday its non-manufacturing activity index jumped to a reading of 57.1 last month, the highest since February, from 45.4 in May. It has bounced back from a reading of 41.8 in April, which was the lowest since March 2009.

A reading above 50 indicates growth in the services sector, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index increasing to a reading of 48.9 in June.

The report followed the ISM’s manufacturing survey last week showing factory activity rebounding to a 14-month high in June. The upbeat surveys, however, have been overshadowed by raging COVID-19 cases in large parts of the country, including the densely populated California, Florida and Texas.

The flare-up in cases that started in late June has prompted several states to scale back or pause reopenings, hitting restaurants and bars hard.

The ISM survey’s measure of new orders for the services industry increased to a reading of 61.6 in June from 41.9 in the prior month. There was an increase in export orders, and order backlogs swelled.


It probably should not be a federal holiday, but future generations may remember Aug. 5, 2011, as The Day the Bond Market Vigilantes Died.

On that date — nine years ago next month — Standard & Poor’s reduced the U.S. government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+, and warned of further markdowns to come.

The failure of President Barack Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to agree on getting the then-$14.3 trillion national debt under control, this authoritative Wall Street voice asserted, meant U.S. “governance and policymaking [were] becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.”

Stocks immediately tanked, and investors fled to the safety of . . . Treasury bonds. The 10-year interest rate fell a fifth of a percentage point after S&P’s announcement.

Rates have stayed down ever since. U.S. 10-year borrowing costs are at a record-low 0.69 percent now, even as the federal debt, driven by massive new deficit spending for coronavirus-related economic rescues, has hit $26.5 trillion, more than 100 percent of economic output — and “governance and policymaking” have set records for dysfunction. Its bluff called, S&P never carried out its threat of more downgrades.

What, then, is the limit for U.S. debt? Clearly, the ceiling is far higher than had been assumed by those of us taught that federal borrowing inevitably “crowds out” private investment.

In a landmark 2019 paper, former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard showed that low interest rates, relative to economic growth, are much more of a historical norm than previously thought, and therefore likely more sustainable even at high levels of debt.

Debate among economists pits those who support exploiting low interest rates to borrow a lot today, while planning lower long-run debt, against advocates of modern monetary theory, who argue that debt is no concern at all, except in the unlikely event inflation appears.

Overblown as they may have been in 2011, however, S&P’s worries — “governance and policymaking” — remain relevant. The amazing marketability of U.S. debt stems from institutional factors rooted, ultimately, in history, law and politics.

The first two are positives: the United States’ liquid and open capital markets; and its strong rule of law, which creates a financial haven in a world of confiscatory despots.


Even before the COVD-19 pandemic forced us to live much of our lives “online,” the emergence of 5G technology was shaping up as one of the most critical waves of innovation that we have seen in our lifetimes. With all the excitement about the potential for 5G was the worry that America would lose the race for global 5G leadership to China. Fortunately, new developments from America’s most innovative companies shows that we are ready to compete (and win) on our terms — innovation.

5G — the 5th generation of wireless networking standards — will revolutionize our technological capabilities. With Internet speeds 100 times faster and more reliable than anything we have ever seen, 5G will make critical technologies like self-driving cars, drones, smart homes, smart cities, online learning and telemedicine a reality.

The last few months have demonstrated how critical fast and reliable connectivity is to our lives. Most Americans have been able to remotely do their jobs, visit their relatives, continue their studies and consult with their doctors. In a 5G world, the ability to do these things — and more — will be even greater. This will improve our lives and lead to millions of new jobs and trillions in wealth creation. 

Who will win the race for 5G and dominate the industries of the future?

China is aggressively pushing for 5G domination largely through unlimited government support of its national champion, Huawei, to win that race. For our nation’s economic — and national — security it’s critical that we, not China, win the battle for 5G leadership. 

Across the globe, Huawei is virtually giving away 5G hardware to other nations in order to gain a foot hold and dominate 5G delivery. They can do this with unlimited resources thanks to the Chinese government.



Dr. Thomas Sowell has just published "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." He presents actual test scores of students in traditional public schools and charter schools on New York State Education Department's annual English Language Arts test and its Mathematics test. Sowell gives the results of student tests in charter schools such as KIPP, Success Academy, Explore Schools, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First as well as the traditional New York City public schools. On the English Language Arts test, a majority of charter school students, most of whom were black or Hispanic, tested proficient or above. Their achievement ratio was nearly 5 to 1. On the Mathematics test 68 percent of charter schools' 161 grade levels had a majority of students testing proficient. In the traditional public schools, 177 grade levels, just 10 percent had a majority of their student testing proficient.

In April 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that 57 percent of black and 54 percent of Hispanic charter school students passed the statewide ELA compared to 52 percent of white students statewide. On the state math test, 59 percent of black students and 57 percent of Hispanics at city charter schools passed as opposed to 54 percent of white students statewide.

Sowell says: "In a realm where educational failure has long been the norm -- schools in low-income minority neighborhoods -- this is success, a remarkable success. What is equally remarkable is how unwelcome this success has been in many places. What has been especially remarkable is that it has been the most educationally successful charter schools that seem to have drawn the most hostility, both in words and in deeds." The most common form of that hostility are simple legal limits set on the number of charter schools permitted without regard to whether charter schools are producing good or bad educational outcomes.

The education establishment, having the nation's most powerful labor union, has the ears of political leaders. They see a huge loss potential if more parents are able to opt-out of poorly achieving public schools. For example, in New York City there are more than 50,000 students on waiting lists for admission to charter schools. The per-pupil expenditure tops $20,000 a year. If all the students on the waiting list were able to be admitted to charter schools, that would translate into a billion-dollar loss by the traditional public schools. A substantial decline in traditional public school attendance would mean fewer teachers employed. That would mean declining union dues since most charter school teachers are not union members. Charter schools' rate of growth since the 1990s has been significant. From 2001 to 2016, enrollment at traditional public schools rose 1percent while enrollment in public charter schools rose 571 percent.

If you are going to write a new popular history of Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain, you’d better come up with an interesting angle, or you risk covering no new ground—or worse, if you are a modern academic, you produce revisionist nonsense and sociological vomit.

In The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During The Blitz, Erik Larson, the author of huge bestseller The Devil in the White City, is no academic. He gives us the homebody version of the prime minister, and develops the part of the story that took place in the dining rooms and living quarters of 10 Downing Street, and the country house weekend retreat of Chequers and Ditchley, Churchill’s “full-moon” stand-in for Chequers, during that fateful year.

Larson opens his story with Churchill meeting a reluctant King George VI, who would much rather have had his buddy the Earl of Halifax get the nod. Churchill took over just before British and French resistance to the German invasion collapsed. The British evacuated Dunkirk, and many in England assumed the English Channel wouldn’t stop the surge of National Socialist forces pursuing behind.

In fact, Adolf Hitler expected—based on recent British waffling—that the Brits would sue for a negotiated peace without Germany having to invade, or perhaps even having to fire a shot. After that, he could turn his attention to the conquest of the remainder of Eastern Europe and Russia. But Hitler was not dealing with Neville Chamberlain anymore. There was no surrender in Churchill.

The Nazis’ decision to wage a preliminary air war must have seemed like a no-brainer at first. Even Churchill was fearful of the possibility that his country would simply cave. On the final day of the Dunkirk evacuation, he gave his famous June 4 speech to the House of Commons with the rousing lines “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. . .” Larson reminds us that as “the House roared its approval, Churchill muttered to a colleague, ‘And…we will fight them with the butt end of broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.’”

The Air Force recently announced its "new bomber vision" in which "dynamic force employment" replaces continuous bomber presence at Guam. The new vision is for bombers to pop up unexpectedly around the world, thus demonstrating a perpetual ability to project power.

The new vision can depict national resolve in the absence of a hot war. However, during an actual conflict, deploying bombers (or fighters) to bases that are not robustly defended against a range of attacks could be a quick way to lose the use of that base and, depending on the severity of the attack and in-place sheltering, many aircraft and trained personnel.

Air Force Chief General Charles Brown wants the Air Force to develop more mobile airbase defenses in light of longer-ranged Chinese missile threats. Given the panoply of existing and potential threats, General Brown is fortunate to be closely connected to the new Space Force, which can complement current land- and sea-based defenses to provide substantially better protection of potential Air Force bases.

Looking first at threats and defense capabilities

China and Russia have long-range kinetic attack capabilities with missiles launched from land or sea. North Korea and Iran have regional kinetic attack capabilities with missiles launched from land, future longer-range missiles appear possible, and both are developing sea-launched missiles.

The current land-based and properly placed sea-based missile defenses could be effective against unsophisticated North Korean and Iranian missile attacks. However, if China or Russia were to mount sophisticated attacks with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or hypersonic missiles—particularly in combination—such defenses would likely be severely challenged or defeated.

It is openly acknowledged that the U.S. cannot currently defend against hypersonic missiles, which have much lower trajectories than ordinary ballistic missiles.


Panic-stricken headlines about “murder hornets” are thankfully mostly behind us. The nickname may have staying power, but it is certainly unearned.

First spotted in British Columbia in August 2019, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) poses little threat to humans. In its native range in East Asia, the giant hornet is chiefly a menace to the livelihoods of beekeepers, provoking concern that it could cause similar problems in North America.

As a result, giant hornets are still very much top-of-mind for agricultural authorities in Washington state and British Columbia: this spring, the species has turned up again in both places.

Introduced but not established
The three hornets found this spring have all been mated queens, which means at least one colony successfully reproduced last year. Despite that fact, giant hornets are not considered established in North America, which would require successful reproduction over multiple generations.

The species has yet to complete its entire life cycle here; entomologists with the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the B.C. government are working together to keep it that way.

Through a program of trapping, tracking and removal of giant hornet nests, there is a real chance of reversing this introduction. This is thanks in large part to basic natural history research.

To get out ahead of the giant hornet’s introduction, entomologists are leaning heavily on extensive literature about this species in Japan, where its biology has been studied in exhaustive detail.

Stopping the introduction will in many ways be a race against the clock, but because the giant hornet’s life cycle can be plotted on a calendar, entomologists know just how fast to move and when to act. This is an uncommon advantage when it comes to species introductions and it might make all the difference.
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