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Current as of Sept. 18, 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 - 2.0%
  • 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 - .51%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.6%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.4%
  • 75 and up - 17.1%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 37 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 17% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 23%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 24%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: September 16, 2020 7:36 AM PST

211
vaccines are in development.

32
are now in clinical testing.


The Florida Department of Health says that it has now determined that a 2-year-old boy from Escambia County did not die from a COVID-19-related illness. 

After the young boy's death was removed from the latest state line list from the DOH Thursday, 10 Tampa Bay reached out to the state for clarification. 

The health department responded saying "It has been determined that the death was not COVID-19 related."

On Wednesday, the report listed his death. At the time, that would've made him the youngest person known to have died of COVID-19 in Florida. 

The child lived in Escambia County; his case was counted as COVID-related on March 30. However, this entry was not made until the Department of Health's report on Sept. 16. His death was not travel-related and there was no contact with a known case, the report read...


Texas health officials announced Monday that they are changing the way the state reports a key metric used to evaluate the extent of coronavirus infection, a move that conceded that the state’s previous method of calculating the “positivity rate” muddied the extent of viral transmission by mixing old data with new.

The Texas Department of State Health Services said it will now “primarily rely” on a new calculation of the daily positivity rate — defined as the share of tests that yield positive results — that takes into account the date on which a coronavirus test was administered.

Officials said the new metric will give a more accurate representation of viral transmission in Texas on a given day.

It also means that each day’s positivity rate will be an oft-changing number, fluctuating as officials collect lab results over time. Labs and hospitals report their test results to the state with varying degrees of timeliness, and state officials will have to recalculate the positivity rates for previous days as more test results from those dates pour in.

That’s a departure from the current system, which calculates the positivity rate based on the date the health agency receives test results, which can be weeks or even months after the tests were administered.

It marks the latest in a series of data methodology changes and corrections health officials have issued over the course of the pandemic.

While touting the new reporting method as an improvement, state officials defended the old system as providing the best information that was available at the time. The new positivity rate for the most part closely resembles the old metric, particularly when viewed as a trend line over time, officials said.

Health department spokesperson Chris Van Deusen said in an email that the different positivity rates generally moved in parallel until about August, when the state reported dumps of test results. “As long as the test results and new cases were reported fairly close in time, the case reported date was working as a metric,” he said...

In its announcement, the Texas Department of State Health Services said the new calculations for the positivity rate will provide a more accurate representation of coronavirus transmission on any given day. It said the change was made after technology improvements last month improved the department's ability to use data from labs and other testing sites. The agency said that until recently, it wasn’t able to track test results by the date they were administered.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, so must the data we share,” Texas Department of State Health Services Commissioner John Hellerstedt said in a prepared statement. “Our information must provide the clearest possible picture of what is happening now and what has occurred in the past...”


The novel coronavirus spreads when people are in close quarters for extended periods of time, breathing the same air, with little space between them. So you might expect airplanes to be the perfect environment for the transmission.

But some surprising data from airline workers show that is not the case. In fact, flight attendants and other airline workers have had a lower incidence of COVID-19 been lower than among the general population.

According to airline executives and union leaders, that's a sign that safety measures airlines are taking on airplanes are having an impact.

"At United, but also at our large competitors, our flight attendants have lower COVID infection rates than the general population," Scott Kirby, CEO of United, said on Wednesday at a forum hosted by Politico. "Which is one of multiple data points that speaks to the safety on board airplanes."

"If the experience of flying was not safe, you'd expect our people to get sick," Delta CEO Ed Bastian said on Thursday, speaking at the SAP Concur forum. "We track the health of our people. Our people are meaningfully less infected than the general population."

United Airlines passengers wear masks during a flight. United Airlines
American Airlines president Robert Isom made the same claim at a conference a week ago, noting that customer-facing employees had the lowest rates.

"The actions we have taken to ensure the safety and well-being of our team and customers are working," Isom said.

The data backs that conclusion. A little over 1,000 flight attendants nationwide have tested positive for COVID-19, according to data provided by the Association of Flight Attendants (the number includes their members, as well as members of other unions and non-unionized workers).

That's out of about 122,000 people who were employed as flight attendants in the US as of the end of 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or a 0.8% incidence.

There have been a total of 6.6 million confirmed cases in the US, according to data compiled by the New York Times. Out of a population of about 330 million, that's a 2% incidence...

Every major commercial airline in the US requires passengers and crew to wear masks on board and in the airport, and airlines have rolled out new intense sanitization and cleaning procedures. United, for instance, has crews clean every plane after each flight with a disinfectant from an electrostatic sprayer.

Airlines have also been quick to discuss the airflow pattern on aircraft. Rather than blowing front-to-back or side-to-side, cabin air comes from ducts in the ceiling and flows down to vents in the floor, a pattern that makes it difficult for airborne germs to spread between people.

While some cabin air is recirculated and mixed with outside air, it passes through high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, which capture 99.9% of particles between 0.1 and 0.3 microns in diameter, according to the CDC — including the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Additionally, some airlines, including Southwest and Delta, have chosen to limit capacity and block the middle seat on their flights. Research has suggested that blocking middles seats halves the risk of transmission on flights, but also suggests that the overall risk is low either way.

All in all, the low rates among flight attendants and airline workers suggest that the combination of safety measures on board airplanes works...

In case you missed it, and most of the media did, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday that the median household income in 2019 grew a whopping 6.8%—the largest annual increase on record. While this year’s government-ordered lockdowns will erase these gains in the short term at least, it’s still worth highlighting how lower-income workers and minorities benefited from faster growth and a tighter labor market before the pandemic.

Real median U.S. household income last year rose by $4,379 to $68,709. In dollar amounts, this is nearly 50% more than during the eight years of Barack Obama’s Presidency. The wealthy last year benefited from a roaring stock market, as they did during most of the Obama years.

But lower and middle-income folks were also finally sharing more in the country’s growing wealth. Notably, median household incomes increased more among Hispanics (7.1%), blacks (7.9%), Asians (10.6%) and foreign-born workers (8.5%) versus whites (5.7%) and native-born Americans (6.2%). One reason is more Americans with lower education levels were working.

Last year the number of Americans with employment earnings increased by 2.2 million, including 1.2 million more who were employed full-time, year-round. Median earnings increased by an astounding 7.8% for women compared to 2.5% for men. What was that about closing the gender earnings gap?

After the 2008-2009 recession, increases in government transfers reduced the incentive for unemployed Americans to work. These included 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, which didn’t lapse until 2013 and then many Americans out of work went on Social Security disability.

Between the third quarter of 2009—the recession officially ended in June—and the third quarter of 2015, labor participation among 25- to 54-year-olds declined to 80.7% from 82.7%. Accelerating wage growth in recent years, particularly in blue-collar industries, has drawn more workers off the sidelines, and the prime-age labor participation rate climbed back to 82.9% during the first quarter of 2020.

The result: Poverty fell 1.3 percentage points last year to 10.5%, the lowest level since 1959, and declined more for blacks (2 percentage points), Hispanics (1.8), Asians (2.8), single mothers (2.6), people with a disability (3.2), and no high-school diploma (2.2). The black (18.8%) and Hispanic (15.7%) poverty rates were the lowest in history.

As family household incomes increased, the child poverty rate also declined to 14.4% from 16.2% in 2018 and 18% in 2016. The decline in childhood poverty last year was nearly twice as much as during the entire Obama Presidency. The most pro-family policies are those that increase jobs and wages.

Income inequality last year also declined by most measures as the bottom quintile’s share of income grew 2.4%. But incomes grew across the distribution with many lower earners rising into the middle class, some of whom joined the ranks of the affluent.

The share of households making less than $15,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars declined to 9.1% last year from 10.4% in 2016 and 11.2% in 2010. At the same time, the share with income between $75,000 and $200,000 increased to 36.1% from 34.4% in 2016 and 32.8% in 2010 while the percentage earning more than $200,000 ticked up to 10.3% from 8% in 2016 and 5.9% in 2010.

In other words, all Americans were gaining economic ground. But lower and middle-class Americans enjoyed the largest gains relative to the Obama Presidency. Incomes naturally fell during the 2008-2009 recession, but they were slow to recover. Worker earnings declined and poverty rose through 2012 despite the increase in government transfer payments.

Income transfers are supposed to temporarily offset earnings during downturns, but for many Americans they became substitutes for jobs after the last two recessions. Not until 2015, when government tightened up on disability payments, did household incomes begin to rise markedly as more prime-working age Americans returned to the workforce.

***

These income gains weren’t magical. Policy changes mattered. The Obama Administration’s obsession with income redistribution and regulation retarded business investment and economic growth. This in turn led to slower income growth for most Americans.

Business investment and hiring increased amid the Trump Administration’s deregulation and the GOP’s 2017 tax reform that unleashed animal spirits. New business applications increased twice as much during the first two years of the Trump Presidency versus the last two Obama years, other Census data show.

Employers competed for workers by increasing wages and digging deeper into applicant pools by hiring folks with disabilities, less education and even criminal records. Rising economic growth lifted all classes...

The politics of 21st-century America has overflowed with constitutional controversies. From debates about war and emergency powers to litigation over health care, marriage, religious liberty, immigration, and financial regulation to the impeachment of a president, we have frequently fought over how to put into effect the 230-year-old blueprint for our government.

These have been important and necessary arguments. But to consider them together is to see that our understanding of constitutionalism, across the political spectrum, has become too narrow. And that narrowness is not only a symptom but also a cause of the dysfunction of our politics.

Simply put, we now tend to treat the Constitution as exclusively the business of lawyers and judges, and to think that what’s at stake in our constitutional disputes is ultimately policy — what our government can do about various public problems. This is at best a badly inadequate understanding, and it leaves us with a blinkered constitutionalism that will not serve us well.

To see why, we can start with a simple question: What is the Constitution? It’s a difficult question to answer not because the Constitution is irrelevant or unknown to us, but because we identify our society with it to an unusual degree. As the historian Hans Kohn put it in his 1957 classic American Nationalism, “the American Constitution is unlike any other: it represents the lifeblood of the American nation, its supreme symbol and manifestation. It is so intimately welded with the national existence itself that the two have become inseparable.”

This is not much less true in our time, though we have emphasized different facets of the Constitution as our conception of American life has changed. We may think of our society now less in terms of the constrained enumerated powers of Article I and more in terms of an ever-broadening set of claims about the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment. But the deepest currents, and the deepest disputes, in American life are still frequently envisaged and enunciated in constitutional terms.

Yet for that very reason, because they seem to come so naturally to us, we have trouble fully articulating those terms. We naturally think of our Constitution as a framework — an arrangement of interlocking powers and restraints that establishes a system through which we govern ourselves. But what sort of framework is it? The answers to that question fall into roughly four categories.

First, we might think of the Constitution as a legal framework — a text duly enacted that establishes a set of rules that can be put into effect by public officials and interpreted by judges in response to cases and controversies over time. The Constitution describes itself as “the supreme Law of the Land,” and it certainly is first and foremost a legal document in this sense.

Second, we might think of the Constitution as a policymaking framework — a set of tools and authorities that enable a government to address practical problems by making laws, implementing them, raising revenue, spending it, creating public programs, and taking policy action. Our Constitution was adopted because the Articles of Confederation that preceded it were grossly inadequate as a policymaking framework, and it certainly was and remains a better one.

Third, we might think of the Constitution as an institutional framework — a set of formalized bodies (legislative, executive, and judicial), each with a distinct structure and character and each carrying out a particular kind of work. Our constitutional system is made up of these interlocking institutions, and is given its shape by their forms.

Fourth and finally, we might think of the Constitution as a political framework — an arrangement of powers and practices that answers to some enduring moral truths and desired ends of government and sets up a regime with a particular character, tone, and ethic. To be a constitutionalist is at least at some level to champion that regime, and the ideas of government and the citizen for which it stands.

These conceptions of the Constitution are not mutually exclusive; our founding document is simultaneously a legal framework, a policymaking framework, an institutional framework, and a political framework. But at different times we tend to prioritize each of these four facets differently. And in our time, we dramatically overemphasize the first two and under-emphasize the last two.

To think about the Constitution legalistically is to see it simply as a set of rules to be applied and interpreted, ultimately by judges. This view obviously makes sense up to a point. Judges have a foremost role in constitutional interpretation, and the Constitution is, in some of its most crucial respects, a form of law. But this view is easily taken too far, and so can encourage an excessively lawyerly constitutional practice that comes down to a search for technicalities that justify various uses of power and so narrows our understanding of what political life involves...

To take one example, when President George W. Bush signed the McCain–Feingold campaign-finance law in 2002, he noted in a signing statement that he had some “reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising.” But rather than refuse to sign a bill he deemed constitutionally dubious, he concluded, “I expect that the courts will resolve these legitimate legal questions as appropriate under the law.”

To simply equate the constitutional and the legal is to radically constrain the scope of our politics, and ultimately to evade essential duties. To treat the Constitution as just a collection of rules is to view the present-day problems with our constitutional system as a function of people doing things they shouldn’t in ways that judges ought to stop. And in many significant cases, this view is mistaken.

To think of the Constitution as a policy instrument, meanwhile, is also surely reasonable up to a point. Our system exists to enable a government to address public problems and meet national needs. But as Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek point out in their important 2017 book The Policy State, there is much more to government than policy. Government also exists to secure basic rights and to structure political relations, for example, and that requires us to think about the Constitution in terms other than policymaking. Policy-centric arguments, like law-centric arguments, cannot always simply trump arguments made on other constitutionalist grounds.

So when courts prioritize Congress’s goals (in health-care legislation, for instance) over the texts of the laws it writes or the separation of powers, they distort the character of our system and endanger its other objectives... An overemphasis of policy objectives tends to blind us to institutional concerns: If only the substantive goal matters, then questions regarding who acts for our government, and when and how they do it, can easily come to seem like distractions. And an overemphasis of legalistic constitutionalism leads to an overemphasis of the relations among the branches rather than the substantive work distinctly appropriate to each of them as institutions.

Yet some of the most difficult constitutional challenges we face today might be best understood as rooted in institutional problems. You might not know it from the way we tend to think about the separation of powers, which leaves us imagining that there is a fungible commodity called “power” that the different branches exercise and the salient question is who has more or less of it. But what’s important about our system is not so much that it divides the power of the national government into three as that it divides it among legislative, executive, and judicial institutions, each of which is expected to exercise its authorities differently, and for a different purpose.

Congress generally creates the frameworks for government action. It makes the laws that channel public power, allocate public resources, and establish boundaries on the public sphere. In a complex society like ours, these kinds of frameworks are necessarily the product of accommodation and compromise, and the work of the Congress is therefore necessarily plural: It is a work of many, and involves conciliation among them.

The presidency, meanwhile, generally acts within the frameworks established by the laws that Congress passes. The purpose of the office is action, and its institutional design reflects that. The president applies the sorts of power given him by Congress (and in some limited circumstances directly by the Constitution) to the particular circumstances our society confronts, and wields it in the moment to secure the nation and carry out its laws. He reacts to events, adjusts to pressures, and makes concrete choices among permissible options in complicated situations. Action like that is necessarily a singular endeavor, not a group activity, and to be carried off well it requires energy, boldness, focus, and ambition. The executive branch of our government is supposed to enable those virtues in the single person chosen to exercise the power it possesses.

Lastly, the judiciary steps in after frameworks have been framed and actions have been acted, and reviews them both in response to cases and complaints to make sure that general rules have been applied appropriately in particular circumstances. It neither creates frameworks nor acts on behalf of the public, but instead assesses the behavior of those who do those things.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past. The most crucial differences between them are not power imbalances, but fundamental distinctions of purpose, structure, and form. So they are best understood in institutional terms.

That means we need to judge the health of our system not only by whether the various players in it are transgressing the boundaries established around their power but also by whether they are playing the sorts of roles assigned to them within those boundaries...

Too often nowadays, they fail to play their proper parts because they fail to think in these kinds of institutional terms. They don’t understand their jobs in the context of the distinct forms and functions our system assigns them, but in terms of the roles they play in the culture-war theater of our politics, where the goal is not legislative bargaining or executive action or judicial review but performative outrage for a partisan audience. Pushing back against this would mean not only policing the relations between the branches but articulating a revitalized constitutionalism — rooted in the text of the document and informed by the thinking of the framers and the history of our constitutional system — that reemphasizes the characters of our distinct governing institutions.

Crucially, such an institutional approach to our system of government could help us see not only when one of the branches overreaches but also when it under-reaches, and so fails to do its necessary work. Congress today plainly under-reaches in this way. Its members want to shirk responsibility for hard decisions, and tend to favor vague legislative mandates that describe popular goals but leave the tough governing details to bureaucrats and judges. That’s not illegal, and no court can do much about it. But it is a dereliction of constitutional duty that does serious harm to our system of government.

This points to the final form of constitutionalism, which is the most capacious if also the most nebulous. Some of the constitutional challenges we confront now are political, in the deepest sense: They are about the character of our polity, and the nature of citizenship and authority within it. They may touch on deeply sensitive social issues — race, the family, religion, etc. — or they may involve the ways in which we live together, respect each other, understand our rights and obligations as citizens, govern our communities and nation, or accommodate differences... A properly political conception of the Constitution... would recognize that when we speak of our Constitution, we speak of the character of our society.

That character can change over time, even though the words on the page do not; how we as citizens approach our system of government can change, even if the ways in which judges approach it should not. The Constitution creates and protects a broad arena for political action, and it permits (without requiring) a broad range of possible reforms and transformations of our common life over time. Those are best worked out politically. When they are instead left to the courts to determine, we confuse legal and political constitutionalism so that what should be negotiated becomes mandated instead, often undermining the legitimacy of the resulting arrangements and making a dangerous hash of the relevant areas of law — as we have seen in nondiscrimination law, abortion law, administrative law, and other arenas over the past half century.

The boundaries between these different conceptions of constitutionalism are not always perfectly clear, of course. There are times when political constitutionalism, broadly understood, may be very relevant to legal constitutionalism — as we find for instance in some contemporary disputes among originalists about the standing of the Declaration of Independence as law, or about the relative importance of individual rights and institutional responsibilities. There are times when the Constitution’s role as a policy framework becomes inseparable from its institutional character, and forces us to ask about the ultimate purpose of a legislature or a court. But these are nonetheless four distinct facets of constitutionalism that refine and enlarge one another in ways that make it easier to grasp the deepest meaning of the Constitution...