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Current as of August 17, 2020, at 8:15 a.m. |
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COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
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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.
Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19
Data Sources
Data Sources on Social Media
Other Resources
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Current Statistics
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Fatality rate in Florida - 1.7%
- Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
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15-24 years old - .03%
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25-34 years old - .06%
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35-44 years old - .20%
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45-54 years old - .44%
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55-64 years old - 1.4%
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65-74 years old - 4.6%
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75 and up - 15.0%
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Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%
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Median age of new Covid cases - 44 years old
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Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 34% decrease
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ICU beds available in Florida - 22%
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Hospital beds available in Florida - 27%
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Vaccine Tracking
August 14, 2020 12:39 PM PST
202
vaccines are in development.
25
are now in clinical testing.
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Florida reported about 3,900 new cases of the coronavirus Sunday, the lowest daily total in nearly two months. The number of Floridians dying of the disease — 107 — also took a dramatic downward turn from the last few days.
The lower numbers come just days before Florida voters cast ballots Tuesday in primaries across the state for congressional, legislative and other seats. More than 2.3 million people have opted to vote early, instead of braving lines and the risk of infection.
Election officials have urged voters to avoid the trip to precincts on Election Day by casting ballots early, including mailing in their completed ballots. Officials, however, have assured voters who decide to show up a the polls on Tuesday that doing so will be safe.
It remained to be seen how the pandemic will affect the election on Tuesday and in November, when Florida again plays a crucial role in the presidential race.
It also remained to be seen how lasting the dips in deaths and new cases will be — considering how unpredictable the outbreak has been since its start five months ago.
Still, the new cases announced Sunday by the Florida Health Department continued a steady decline from last month, when the one-day total of newly reported cases surged to 15,300 cases on July 12.
The number of new cases is the lowest since June 23, when officials reported 3,286 new cases.
The dip brought down the daily average of new infections to a little more than 5,800 a day over the past week. The average number of deaths over the same period was slightly more than 180 deaths a day.
The number of deaths reported Sunday was about half of the totals from each of the past two days.
Hospitalizations generally held steady, with nearly 5,700 people being treated for the virus.
To the immune system, not all germs are equally memorable. But our body’s cells seem to be seriously studying up on the coronavirus.
Scientists who have been monitoring immune responses to the virus are now starting to see encouraging signs of strong, lasting immunity, even in people who developed only mild symptoms of Covid-19, a flurry of new studies suggests. Disease-fighting antibodies, as well as immune cells called B cells and T cells that are capable of recognizing the virus, appear to persist months after infections have resolved — an encouraging echo of the body’s enduring response to other viruses.
“Things are really working as they’re supposed to,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona and an author on one of the new studies, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Although researchers cannot forecast how long these immune responses will last, many experts consider the data a welcome indication that the body’s most studious cells are doing their job — and will have a good chance of fending off the coronavirus, faster and more fervently than before, if exposed to it again.
“This is exactly what you would hope for,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on another of the new studies, which is currently under review at the journal Nature. “All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response.”
Protection against reinfection cannot be fully confirmed until there is proof that most people who encounter the virus a second time are actually able to keep it at bay, Dr. Pepper said. But the findings could help quell recent concerns over the virus’s ability to dupe the immune system into amnesia, leaving people vulnerable to repeat bouts of disease.
Researchers have yet to find unambiguous evidence that coronavirus reinfections are occurring, especially within the few months that the virus has been rippling through the human population. The prospect of immune memory “helps to explain that,” Dr. Pepper said.
In discussions about immune responses to the coronavirus, much of the conversation has focused on antibodies — Y-shaped proteins that can latch onto the surfaces of pathogens and block them from infecting cells. But antibodies represent just one wing of a complex and coordinated squadron of immune soldiers, each with their own unique modes of attack. Viruses that have already invaded cells, for instance, are cloaked from antibodies, but are still vulnerable to killer T cells, which force infected cells to self-destruct. Another set of T cells, nicknamed “helpers,” can coax B cells to mature into antibody-making machines.
(Yet another sector of the immune system assails pathogens within minutes of their arrival, while sending out signals called cytokines to mobilize forces from elsewhere in the body. Some evidence suggests that severe cases of Covid-19 may stem from this early process going awry.)
Antibodies also come with an expiration date: Because they are inanimate proteins and not living cells, they can’t replenish themselves, and so disappear from the blood just weeks or months after they are produced. Hoards of antibodies appear shortly after a virus has breached the body’s barriers, then wane as the threat dissipates. Most of the B cells that produce these early antibodies die off as well.
But even when not under siege, the body retains a battalion of longer-lived B cells that can churn out virus-fighting antibodies en masse, should they prove useful again. Some patrol the bloodstream, waiting to be triggered anew; others retreat into the bone marrow, generating small amounts of antibodies that are detectable years, sometimes decades, after an infection is over. Several studies, including those led by Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Pepper, have found antibodies capable of incapacitating the coronavirus lingering at low levels in the blood months after people have recovered from Covid-19.
“The antibodies decline, but they settle in what looks like a stable nadir,” which is observable about three months after symptoms start, Dr. Bhattacharya said. “The response looks perfectly durable.”
Seeing antibodies this long after infection is a strong indication that B cells are still chugging away in the bone marrow, Dr. Pepper said. She and her team were also able to pluck B cells that recognize the coronavirus from the blood of people who have recovered from mild cases of Covid-19 and grow them in the lab.
Multiple studies, including one published on Friday in the journal Cell, have also managed to isolate coronavirus-attacking T cells from the blood of recovered individuals — long after symptoms have disappeared. When provoked with bits of the coronavirus in the lab, these T cells pumped out virus-fighting signals, and cloned themselves into fresh armies ready to confront a familiar foe. Some reports have noted that analyses of T cells could give researchers a glimpse into the immune response to the coronavirus, even in patients whose antibody levels have declined to a point where they are difficult to detect.
“This is very promising,” said Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying immune responses to the coronavirus in rhesus macaques but was not involved in the new studies. “This calls for some optimism about herd immunity, and potentially a vaccine.”
Notably, several of the new studies are finding these powerful responses in people who did not develop severe cases of Covid-19, Dr. Iyer added. Some researchers have worried that infections that take a smaller toll on the body are less memorable to the immune system’s studious cells, which may prefer to invest their resources in more serious assaults. In some cases, the body could even jettison the viruses so quickly that it fails to catalog them. “This paper suggests this is not true,” Dr. Iyer said. “You can still get durable immunity without suffering the consequences of infection.”
What has been observed in people who fought off mild cases of Covid-19 might not hold true for hospitalized patients, whose bodies struggle to marshal a balanced immune response to the virus, or those who were infected but had no symptoms at all. Research groups around the world are continuing to study the entire range of responses. But “the vast majority of the cases are these mild infections,” said Jason Netland, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on the paper under review at Nature. “If those people are going to be protected, that’s still good.”
This new spate of studies could also further assuage fears about how and when the pandemic will end. On Friday, updated guidance released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was misinterpreted by several news reports that suggested immunity against the coronavirus might last only a few months. Experts quickly responded, noting the dangers of propagating such statements and pointing to the wealth of evidence that people who previously had the virus are probably at least partly protected from reinfection for at least three months, if not much longer.
Considered with other recent reports, the new data reinforce the idea that, “Yes, you do develop immunity to this virus, and good immunity to this virus,” said Dr. Eun-Hyung Lee, an immunologist at Emory University who was not involved in the studies. “That’s the message we want to get out there.”
Some illnesses, like the flu, can plague populations repeatedly. But that is at least partly attributable to the high mutation rates of influenza viruses, which can quickly make the pathogens unrecognizable to the immune system. Coronaviruses, in contrast, tend to change their appearance less readily from year to year.
Still, much remains unknown. Although these studies hint at the potential for protectiveness, they do not demonstrate protection in action, said Cheong-Hee Chang, an immunologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the new studies. “It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen,” Dr. Chang said. “Humans are so heterogeneous. There are so many factors coming into play.”
But tracking long-term human responses will take time, Dr. Pepper said. Good immune memory, she added, requires molecules and cells to be abundant, effective and durable — and scientists cannot yet say that all three conditions have been definitively met.
As people’s bodies settle into their post-coronavirus state, “we’re just now hitting the point of relevance” to take the long view on immunity, Dr. Bhattacharya said. Things may change a few months or years down the line. Or they may not.
“There’s no shortcuts here,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “We just have to follow it out.”
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In the spring of 2019, shoppers filled Home Depot Inc. aisles to grab deals on mulch, patio furniture and everything needed to get a garden ready for summer.
This year, as the coronavirus pandemic started to spread through the U.S., Home Depot canceled its spring sale events. Staff cleared aisles of discounted goods to make room for social distancing, abandoning the linchpin of the retailer’s peak season.
“It’s a really interesting time when you tell your field leadership team that right now our job isn’t to focus on driving sales,” said Home Depot Chief Executive Craig Menear. “We said, ‘We can’t do things normally and drive huge amounts of traffic to the stores.’ ”
Daily foot traffic to Home Depot stores since April has been running at least 35% above last year’s, according to Unacast Inc., which tracks location data from 25 million cellphones on any given day. In 26 states, traffic doubled following a surge in late May.
Even the winners, though, have had to quickly abandon pre-pandemic business models and instincts. Old systems can’t forecast demand for products and services or track consumer trends. Companies staff differently with health in mind, and many are spending heavily to manage the crisis.
“All of the historical benchmarks that we’ve used to think about the business and what the growth in the business would be, like GDP and housing...none of that has a correlation anymore,” Mr. Menear, 63, said in a July interview.
Instead, “we’re watching consumer demand very, very carefully,” he said. “This is our number one thing.”
Possible consumer-spending weakness later this year is a cloud on the horizon, said some retail analysts. “With stimulus waning and unemployment still elevated, discretionary spending seems likely to slow somewhat,” said Peter Benedict, retail analyst at Baird Equity Research. Still, he said, spending on homes versus other activities such as travel and restaurants is likely to stick.
Frozen economy
Home Depot is already among North America’s largest retailers, employing more than 400,000 people and generating more than $100 billion in annual sales.
Until this year, its growth closely mirrored the U.S. economy and housing market. When the U.S. economy froze early in the pandemic, though, Home Depot grew. Its comparable sales—including stores and digital channels operating for at least a year—rose 6.4% in the quarter ended May 3, more than double the growth in the year-ago quarter.
Behind Home Depot’s surge are people like Dallas residents Kelly and Bob Waterman. Since the pandemic started, they have replaced their front door and painted and redecorated their daughter’s room in a sky-blue motif. They are remodeling their kitchen and replacing their deck, after waiting for a contractor to become available, said Ms. Waterman.
They have headed to Home Depot frequently for plants, potting soil, a tool rack and air conditioning filters, said Ms. Waterman, 59. “We have spent so much time at home,” she said. “You start noticing the things you’ve always wanted to change, but never had the time to do.”
At rival Lowe’s Cos ., comparable sales rose 11.2% in the spring quarter. Lowe’s didn’t cancel its spring sales events and relies less on professional contractors, who couldn’t go into homes for weeks in some states.
Analysts predict record growth when both companies this week report results for May through July. Comparable sales are expected to climb 10.9% at Home Depot and 14.3% at Lowe’s, according to average estimates collected by FactSet. Home Depot’s and Lowe’s shares have climbed to records, with Home Depot’s hitting $280 on Friday, up 40% from a year ago.
Spending on homes is also boosting sales of products ranging from throw pillows to scented candles, helping retailers like At Home Group Inc., a home-décor chain with 219 big-box stores. Customers “are doing the projects around the house first and then the decorating second,” said At Home CEO Lee Bird.
When At Home stores closed from late March through April, it rushed to roll out online sales and let customers pick up from store parking lots, said Mr. Bird. Once stores reopened, sales surged, he said; comparable sales rose 42% in the quarter ended July 25 after falling 47% in the previous quarter, when its stores shut.
Home Depot, since opening its first stores in 1979 for do-it-yourself homeowners, has remodeled to focus on professional contractors who now account for roughly 45% of its revenue. The 2008 housing slump forced it to shrink, closing stores and units including its Expo chain of high-end remodeling stores.
The company halted new store openings and today operates roughly the same number of outlets, about 2,300, as it did a decade ago. The retrenchment worked. Since 2010, comparable sales have been growing steadily. It generates about $450 in revenue a square foot, up from about $350 in 2015.
Mr. Menear, a soft-spoken Michigan native, joined Home Depot in 1997 and rose through the ranks. He took over as CEO in 2014, winning a succession race to become the third CEO since the company’s co-founders retired. The other contenders, Marvin Ellison and Carol Tomé, are now CEOs of Lowe’s and UPS, respectively.
Essential retailer
Early in the pandemic, Home Depot fought for municipal governments to deem it an essential retailer and remain open, said Mr. Menear. At one point, he said, it navigated more than 600 restrictions that regulated staying open across the country. Executives emphasized to local officials that “if you are sitting in your home and your hot-water heater breaks, as mine did during this time, I was darn glad we were open,” said Mr. Menear, who has been working largely from home since March.
Home Depot knew some hourly workers would come in sick, putting everyone at risk, without the guarantee of a continued paycheck, said Ann-Marie Campbell, executive vice president of its U.S. stores. In March, it started offering full-time workers 80 hours’ paid leave and workers over age 65 or with high-risk conditions a total of 240 hours’ paid leave, which could be paid out if left unused. The benefit accounted for most of a $850 million coronavirus-related labor expense in the May-ended quarter.
Stores in early hot spots like New York were first to limit opening hours or shut to all but online curb-pickup orders, fearful of packing shoppers inside as well as of worker shortages, Ms. Campbell said.
At stores that were open, Home Depot couldn’t find enough hand sanitizer for staff. Executives got one of their paint suppliers, PPG Industries Inc., to make 100,000 gallons.
Home Depot’s online sales had been a small slice of its revenue, and it never had curbside pickup. It rolled out the service in 48 hours in late March. “We literally had associates handmake signs, ‘Curbside Pickup, Park Here,’ ” Ms. Campbell said.
Executives working mostly from home and communicating in daily video calls debated whether to cancel the spring sales event. Aisles would be stacked with discounted items, a crowding risk. In many stores, every other register was closed to promote social distancing, which could slow checkout lines.
Executives also feared the political repercussions of driving sales of nonessential products in ads or circulars, and drawing crowds to its stores. On the other hand, spring products had already moved through the supply chain and would arrive in stores, clogging backrooms with inventory that wouldn’t sell as fast without a sales event.
“We did not think it would create the safest environment for associates, a safe environment for customers,” said Ms. Campbell. Home Depot’s profit margins got a boost in the May quarter from canceling the event because it sold fewer discounted products.
Some customers, labor activists and workers criticized Home Depot and other retailers for not quickly doing more to protect workers and customers, such as immediately requiring shoppers to wear masks or further limiting crowds when sales surged.
“I’m worried that if there is a second stimulus check, things will start up again” and too many shoppers will be in stores, said a worker who has been with Home Depot for four years and believes the safety protocols now in place still aren’t sufficient.
A Home Depot spokeswoman said it was early to put customer limits on stores. The stores are so large, that locations rarely exceed current social distancing guidelines or regulations. Store managers currently set crowd limits because stores have varying sizes and configurations.
“On the mask front, the CDC recommendations changed,” she said, referring to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “At first it was, we don’t recommend masks, and we were working with the CDC.”
Like many retailers, the company adopted a nationwide mask policy for customers in July.
Home Depot said it confronted supply shortages of some products such as masks and cleaning products. Customers found some items such as lumber in short supply. Some lumber companies reduced inventories early in the pandemic as GDP fell and unemployment skyrocketed—historical indicators of less building activity.
Instead, Americans’ remodeling caused a lumber shortage at some retailers and rising lumber prices. “When you saw so much production come out and demand picked up more quickly, nobody had inventory in the channel, and it’s just been a scramble ever since,” said Devin Stockfish, CEO of wood-products producer Weyerhaeuser Co., during a July earnings presentation. Production and capacity is starting to come back online, he said.
Home Depot, a Weyerhaeuser customer, declined to comment on how it handled shortages.
By early May, Home Depot started letting more shoppers inside stores. It updated its app and supply chain to improve curbside pickup. Then government stimulus checks started boosting sales.
On Friday, the Commerce Department reported U.S. households’ retail spending rose 1.2% in July, the third straight monthly increase. Fresher data suggest spending slowed in August, in part after the July 31 expiration of an enhanced $600 unemployment benefit: Only 36% of consumers tracked by research firm GlobalData spent more or the same amount on retail purchases during the first week of August as they did the same week a year ago, down from 57% who did so during the last week of June.
“There’s 1% of the customers that are going to be contentious about it,” said Ms. Campbell. “If it becomes physical, we’ve told our associates not to engage,” she said. “You can call the local police,” she said. “They may not respond. But you can make that call.”
Home Depot is considering the best ways to monitor Covid-19 among employees, which for now won’t include testing. “One of the biggest challenges with the testing,” Mr. Menear said, “is it’s good for that moment in time and only that moment in time.”
The company gave all employees thermometers to check their temperatures at home before shifts. In half of stores, workers take an online health survey before coming in, then have their temperatures checked once at work—a protocol the company plans to implement at all stores in coming weeks, the spokeswoman said.
Home Depot declined to say how may workers have tested positive for Covid-19. When a worker gets sick, Home Depot does contract tracing, continues to pay the sick worker and lets coworkers know, said the spokeswoman.
Mr. Menear said he previously thought he would look back at the 2008 recession and think, “Wow, that’s the most challenging time frame in my career.”
Now, he said, “not so much.”
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Saturday granted emergency use authorization to Yale School of Public Health’s saliva test to detect COVID-19, after a trial on National Basketball Association players and staff.
SalivaDirect, the fifth saliva test approved by the FDA for the disease, requires no swab or collection device and uses spit from people suspected of having the coronavirus, the agency said.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn called the test “groundbreaking” in its efficiency and in being unaffected by crucial component shortages.
SalivaDirect is seen as a cheap, simpler and less invasive testing method that requires no extraction of nucleic acid and can use several readily available reagents.
The NBA has used the test in a program involving asymptomatic players, coaches and staff from various teams, after partnering with Yale in June, the school said in a separate statement.
“We simplified the test so that it only costs a couple of dollars for reagents, and we expect that labs will only charge about $10 per sample,” Nathan Grubaugh, assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health, said.
One of the goals of the research team was to eliminate the need for expensive saliva collection tubes, and a separate study found that the virus is stable in saliva for prolonged periods at warm temperatures, and that preservatives or special test tubes were not necessary, Yale said.
The FDA said the test could lower the risk to healthcare workers from collecting samples as it is self-collected under the observation of a healthcare professional.
Masks do a decent job at keeping the virus from spreading into the environment, but if an infected person is inside a building, inevitably some virus will escape into the air.
Once the virus escapes into the air inside a building, you have two options: bring in fresh air from outside or remove the virus from the air inside the building.
The safest indoor space is one that constantly has lots of outside air replacing the stale air inside.
Simply put, the more fresh, outside air inside a building, the better. Bringing in this air dilutes any contaminant in a building, whether a virus or a something else, and reduces the exposure of anyone inside. Environmental engineers like me quantify how much outside air is getting into a building using a measure called the air exchange rate. This number quantifies the number of times the air inside a building gets replaced with air from outside in an hour.
While the exact rate depends on the number of people and size of the room, most experts consider roughly six air changes an hour to be good for a 10-foot-by-10-foot room with three to four people in it. In a pandemic this should be higher, with one study from 2016 suggesting that an exchange rate of nine times per hour reduced the spread of SARS, MERS and H1N1 in a Hong Kong hospital.
Many buildings in the U.S., especially schools, do not meet recommended ventilation rates. Thankfully, it can be pretty easy to get more outside air into a building. Keeping windows and doors open is a good start. Putting a box fan in a window blowing out can greatly increase air exchange too. In buildings that don’t have operable windows, you can change the mechanical ventilation system to increase how much air it is pumping. But in any room, the more people inside, the faster the air should be replaced.
Using CO2 to measure air circulation
So how do you know if the room you’re in has enough air exchange? It’s actually a pretty hard number to calculate. But there’s an easy-to-measure proxy that can help. Every time you exhale, you release CO2 into the air. Since the coronavirus is most often spread by breathing, coughing or talking, you can use CO2 levels to see if the room is filling up with potentially infectious exhalations. The CO2 level lets you estimate if enough fresh outside air is getting in.
Outdoors, CO2 levels are just above 400 parts per million (ppm). A well ventilated room will have around 800 ppm of CO2. Any higher than that and it is a sign the room might need more ventilation.
Last year, researchers in Taiwan reported on the effect of ventilation on a tuberculosis outbreak at Taipei University. Many of the rooms in the school were underventilated and had CO2 levels above 3,000 ppm. When engineers improved air circulation and got CO2 levels under 600 ppm, the outbreak completely stopped. According to the research, the increase in ventilation was responsible for 97% of the decrease in transmission.
Since the coronavirus is spread through the air, higher CO2 levels in a room likely mean there is a higher chance of transmission if an infected person is inside. Based on the study above, I recommend trying to keep the CO2 levels below 600 ppm. You can buy good CO2 meters for around $100 online; just make sure that they are accurate to within 50 ppm.
Air cleaners
If you are in a room that can’t get enough outside air for dilution, consider an air cleaner, also commonly called air purifiers. These machines remove particles from the air, usually using a filter made of tightly woven fibers. They can capture particles containing bacteria and viruses and can help reduce disease transmission.
The last thing to consider is the validity of the claims made by the company producing the air cleaner. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers certifies air cleaners, so the AHAM Verifide seal is a good place to start. Additionally, the California Air Resources Board has a list of air cleaners that are certified as safe and effective, though not all of them use HEPA filters.
Keep air fresh or get outside
If you are in control of your indoor environment, make sure you are getting enough fresh air from outside circulating into the building. A CO2 monitor can help give you a clue if there is enough ventilation, and if CO2 levels start going up, open some windows and take a break outside. If you can’t get enough fresh air into a room, an air cleaner might be a good idea. If you do get an air cleaner, be aware that they don’t remove CO2, so even though the air might be safer, CO2 levels could still be high in the room.
If you walk into a building and it feels hot, stuffy and crowded, chances are that there is not enough ventilation. Turn around and leave.
By paying attention to air circulation and filtration, improving them where you can and staying away from places where you can’t, you can add another powerful tool to your anti-coronavirus toolkit.
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