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Current as of Oct. 9, 2020, at 7:45 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.

Florida’s Reemployment Assistance Dashboard: 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 - 2.1%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .07%
  • 35-44 years old - .23%
  • 45-54 years old - .55%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.8%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.8%
  • 75 and up - 18.1%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 39 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 20% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 22%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 23%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: October 8, 2020 8:33 PM PST

213
vaccines are in development.

35
are now in clinical testing.


The daily pandemic death counts in Ontario include people who have tested positive for COVID-19 but have not necessarily died from the virus.

The exact number of people who fit into this category is unknown by the government and not even being counted.

The Sun was able to confirm this information after speaking with three of the hardest hit public health units in Ontario — Toronto, Ottawa and Peel Region.

“The mortality data sent to the Ministry and reported in (Ottawa Public Health) dashboard/reports represents the number of Ottawa residents with confirmed COVID-19 who have passed away,” an Ottawa Public Health spokesperson explained via email. “It does not indicate if COVID-19 was the cause of death, and we can’t make that inference.”

According to local health units, this reporting process is required by the province.

“Toronto Public Health continues to follow the provincial definition for how COVID-19 deaths are categorized,” said Dr. Vinita Dubey, Toronto’s associate medical officer of health. “This means that individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not necessarily as a result of COVID-19, are all included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto.”

Toronto Public Health would not provide the number of persons who died with but not necessarily from COVID-19 and would not confirm whether or not they had tallied such a figure.

It may be that health units are not even attempting to put together such data.

“It hasn’t been routine practice for public health units to get the death certificates or any follow-up physician and/or coroner reports that determine whether COVID-19 was the underlying or contributing cause of death,” said a spokesperson for Peel Public Health. “The Ministry has asked health units, however, to report through our provincial reporting systems: all deaths who have died with COVID-19 whether or not it was the cause of death.”

Part of the challenge is in how difficult it is in general to determine the cause of death in older persons who may be suffering from multiple ailments.

“The cause of death of someone with COVID-19 is not necessarily straight forward, as they may have died due to COVID-19 symptom complications, or may have died with COVID-19 but due to another health issue (this is especially true in settings like [long-term care homes] where there are multiple factors simultaneously at play),” explained Ottawa Public Health.

This means that of the almost 3,000 Ontarians whose deaths are included in the provincial COVID-19 case data, it is unknown how many of them did in fact die because of COVID-19.

But experts caution there are reasons why the numbers are counted this way.

“In a pandemic, it’s better to overestimate than underestimate COVID deaths,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist and Professor of Global Health at University of Toronto. “The U.K. and other country data show that COVID killed mostly people in nursing homes in the March-June peak months, but the excess deaths were seen not only where COVID was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, but also in those where it was not (albeit a smaller peak than for COVID).”

Dr. Vivek Goel, a former President and CEO of Public Health Ontario, agrees.

“Generally, it can be difficult, even with a coroner’s report to make the determination of whether someone has died from or with COVID-19,” Goel explained in an email to the Sun. “For example, since COVID-19 is more severe in those with pre-existing conditions in someone with lung disease who gets COVID it will be hard to ascertain which contributed more.”

“Being inclusive in counting all possible cases, as this suggests is the direction, seems to be appropriate to me,” he added.

President Trump has announced that he won't be approving any more economic stimulus or relief legislation until after the election. This may or may not be a wise move — it depends upon your views of what sort of recession we're in right now. A rational view would be that it's good news, for the bad news is that we have two different recessionary events to deal with.

The first recessionary event is obvious: close down large chunks of the economy, and we lose 30% or so of the GDP we had. Open it up again, and we get 30% growth (that being the current best estimate for the third quarter, the period that just ended about a week ago). Of course, a 30% drop followed by 30% growth from that smaller number doesn't get us back to where we started from. We can check this with the unemployment rate of 7.9%. That's half of what it was at its worst point during the coronavirus recession, but still twice as high as the pre-coronavirus rate.

We've had a lot of economic recovery, but not quite enough.

At which point, we could just say let's blow some more of the deficit and get more stimulus! Which is to miss the second recessionary problem we've got.

There are some things we have to do differently now. We cannot just go back to where we were because we're in a different world now. As all journalists know, this being our natural habitat, bars are different now. Social distancing means that concerts, plays, and the live arts just cannot be done as they were.

There's also been an acceleration in already extant trends. More people working from home is going to kill city-center coffee shops and sandwich takeouts. More online shopping will affect bricks-and-mortar retail. These things just aren't going to bounce back. They're going to be different in the future, not just take a mulligan.

This is what the economist Arnold Kling calls a recalculation recession. The important feature of such being that it takes us time to work out how we're going to do these things. How do we do the old things in a new and different manner? What new things replace those old things that won't exist at all?

Anyone who has ever tried to get a job knows that nothing happens immediately here. Even if we knew exactly what to do — we don't, we're going to have to use market experimentation to work that out — already it takes notable time to advertise a job, collect applications, interview, kick HR a few times, and then hire. None of this process is aided by further economic stimulus.

The entire purpose of said stimulus is to save, until it can be reopened, that old economy. Something that only works with those bits that are going to reopen. The change needed as the last part of the process is hampered, positively delayed, by attempts to preserve those old ways.

Any and every economist you care to ask on the point will, if prodded enough, agree with the basic logic here. There are two different recessions, one of which we're just trying to bounce back from, the other we're going to have to change our ways to get out of. Disagreement (and there will always be that, these are economists we're talking about!) will be about the relative importance of each.

At some point, the stimulus has to stop so that we can get on with the task of building the new economy we need instead of continuing to prop up all the last bits of the old one we'll never return to. We've done enough cash-splashing to get the economy as a whole to self-sustaining lift off. So, we should stop and now allow people to get on with the difficult bit: working out how we do things in our new world. No more stimulus is probably the right answer.

Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public. From the start, researchers have warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus.

People who lose their jobs or businesses are more prone to fatal drug overdoses and suicide, and evidence already exists that many more will die from cancerheart diseasepneumonia, and tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented their ailments from being diagnosed early and treated properly.

Yet politicians and public-health officials conducting this unprecedented experiment have paid little attention to these risks. In their initial rush to lock down society, they insisted that there was no time for such analysis—and besides, these were just temporary measures to “flatten the curve” so as not to overwhelm hospitals. But since that danger passed, the lockdown enforcers have found one reason after another to persevere with closures, bans, quarantines, curfews, and other mandates. Anthony Fauci, the White House advisor, recently said that even if a vaccine arrives soon, he does not expect a return to normality before late next year.

He and politicians like New York governor Andrew Cuomo and British prime minister Boris Johnson profess to be following “the science,” but no ethical scientist would conduct such a risky experiment without carefully considering the dangers and monitoring the results. After doing so, a group of leading researchers this week called for an end to the experiment. In a joint statement, the Great Barrington Declaration, they predicted that continued lockdowns will lead to “excess mortality in years to come” and warned of “irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

While the economic and social costs have been enormous, it’s not clear that the lockdowns have brought significant health benefits beyond what was achieved by people’s voluntary social distancing and other actions. Some researchers have credited lockdowns with slowing the pandemic, but they’ve relied on mathematical models with assumptions about people’s behavior and the virus’s tendency to spread—the kinds of models and assumptions that previously produced wild overestimates of how many people would die during the pandemic. Other researchers have sought more direct evidence, looking at mortality patterns. They have detected little impact.

In a comparison of 50 countries, a team led by Rabail Chaudhry of the University of Toronto found that Covid was deadlier in places with older populations and higher rates of obesity, but the mortality rate was no lower in countries that closed their borders or enforced full lockdowns. After analyzing 23 countries and 25 U.S. states with widely varying policies, Andrew Atkeson of UCLA and fellow economists found that the mortality trend was similar everywhere once the disease took hold: the number of daily deaths rose rapidly for 20 to 30 days, and then fell rapidly.

Similar conclusions were reached in analyses of Covid deaths in Europe. By studying the time lag between infection and death, Simon Wood of the University of Edinburgh concluded that infections in Britain were already declining before the nation’s lockdown began in late March. In an analysis of Germany’s 412 counties, Thomas Wieland of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that infections were waning in most of the country before the national lockdown began and that the additional curfews imposed in Bavaria and other states had no effect.

Wieland hasn’t published any work on New York City’s pandemic, but he says that the city’s trend looks similar to Germany’s. If, as some studies have shown, a Covid death typically occurs between 21 days and 26 days after infection, the peak of infections would have occurred at least three weeks prior to the peak in deaths on April 7. That would mean that infections in the city had already begun to decline by March 17—three days before Cuomo announced the lockdown and five days before it took effect.

Of course, it’s possible that lockdowns accelerated the decline in some places and produced benefits that have gone undetected in those studies. Researchers working on different assumptions—such as how quickly the virus kills people—have concluded that lockdowns did save some lives (or at least postponed some deaths). Given all the uncertainties, you can’t rule out some benefits, but that’s hardly a justification for continuing such a risky experiment.

What experimental drug would ever be approved if there were so much conflicting evidence of its efficacy and so much solid evidence of its harmful side effects? The cost-benefit analysis becomes even bleaker if you switch from the metric favored by journalists and politicians—the running total of lives lost—to the metric that’s typically used in evaluating medical efficacy. It’s called the QALY, for quality-adjusted life year, a wonky term for what we think of as a “good year” of life, free from disease and disability. No politician wants to admit publicly that young people’s lives are more valuable than older people’s because they have more healthy years remaining, but using this guide is the most sensible way to allocate health resources—and it’s long been favored by some of the same progressive health-care experts now clamoring for lockdowns.

By the QALY measure, the lockdowns must be the most costly—and cost-ineffective—medical intervention in history because most of the beneficiaries are so near the end of life. Covid-19 disproportionately affects people over 65, who have accounted for nearly 80 percent of the deaths in the United States. The vast majority suffered from other ailments, and more than 40 percent of the victims were living in nursing homes, where the median life expectancy after admission is just five months. In Britain, a study led by the Imperial College economist David Miles concluded that even if you gave the lockdown full credit for averting the most unrealistic worst-case scenario (the projection of 500,000 British deaths, more than ten times the current toll), it would still flunk even the most lenient QALY cost-benefit test.

No one wants to hasten the demise of the elderly, but they and other vulnerable people can be shielded without shutting down the rest of the society, as Sweden and other countries have demonstrated. Sweden was denounced early in the pandemic by lockdown proponents because of its relatively high death rate—and it did initially flounder in protecting nursing homes—but its overall mortality rate is now lower than that of the United States and some other European countries. The rate is higher than that of its Nordic neighbors, but mainly because of demographic differences and other factors not related to its failure to shut down.

None of these facts, though, gets as much as attention as the daily case counts for Covid. Nor do all the unseen casualties: the people dying from heart disease, cancer, suicide, and other causes related to lockdowns and economic distress. Early in the pandemic, Scott Atlas at the Hoover Institution and researchers at Swansea University independently calculated that the lockdowns would ultimately cost more years of life than Covid-19 in the United States and Britain, and the toll seems certain to be worse in poor countries. The World Bank estimates that the coronavirus recession could push 60 million people into extreme poverty, which inevitably means more disease and death.

The lockdowns may have been justified in the spring, when so little was known about the virus and the ways to contain it. But now that we know more, there’s no ethical justification for continuing this failed experiment.