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Current as of June 30, 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

Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step


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


Data Sources on Social Media


Other Resources


To date, more than 28 million COVID19 tests have been performed nationwide. Dr. Dean Watson, VP and Chief Integration Officer at TMH, is sharing more on the increase in testing, the importance of understanding hospitalization & mortality rates and why it's crucial to continue wearing masks.


More than half a million people have died from COVID-19 globally. It is a major tragedy, but perhaps not on the scale some initially feared. And there are finally signs that the pandemic is shuddering in places, as if its engine is running out of fuel. This has encouraged many governments to relinquish lockdowns and allow everyday life to restart, albeit gingerly.

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 has been difficult to predict and understand. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, for example, where the virus is likely to have spread relatively freely through the air-conditioning system linking cabins, only 20% of passengers and crew were infected. Data from military ships and cities such as Stockholm, New York and London also suggest that infections have been around 20% – much lower than earlier mathematical models suggested.

This has led to speculation about whether a population can achieve some sort of immunity to the virus with as little as 20% infected – a proportion well below the widely accepted herd immunity threshold (60-70%).

The Swedish public health authority announced in late April that the capital city, Stockholm, was “showing signs of herd immunity” – estimating that about half its population had been infected. The authority had to backtrack two weeks later, however, when the results of their own antibody study revealed just 7.3% had been infected. But the number of deaths and infections in Stockholm is falling rather than increasing – despite the fact that Sweden hasn’t enforced a lockdown.

Hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic may end sooner than initially feared have been fuelled by speculation about “immunological dark matter”, a type of pre-existing immunity that can’t be detected with SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests.

Antibodies are produced by the body’s B-cells in response to a specific virus. Dark matter, however, involves a feature of the innate immune system termed “T-cell mediated immunity”. T-cells are produced by the thymus and when they encounter the molecules that combat viruses, known as antigens, they become programmed to fight the same or similar viruses in the future.

Studies show that people infected with SARS-CoV-2 indeed have T-cells that are programmed to fight this virus. Surprisingly, people never infected also harbour protective T-cells, probably because they have been exposed to other coronaviruses. This may lead to some level of protection against the virus – potentially explaining why some outbreaks seem to burn out well below the anticipated herd immunity threshold.

Young people and those with mild infections are more likely to have a T-cell response than old people – we know that the reservoir of programmable T-cells declines with age.


We should all be deeply troubled by what appears to be plummeting confidence in experts. This is an alarming trend that can only have devastating consequences, and it must stop.

I say this as an expert. In what? Ethics, that’s what, which gives me moral standing to pass judgment on matters large and small. You want credentials? I have been on TV many times, identified by words beneath my name as an ethical expert—including twice on Oprah. And how did I achieve such lofty stature without ever having so much as taken an ethics course in college? Esquire enlisted me to write a column on the subject.

So what if the job came as a kind of booby prize, since I’d been petitioning the magazine to let me do a humor column? Never mind that, by dint of both inexperience and total lack of interest, my initial response was incredulity. “Don’t worry,” assured my editor, “just write your humor column, then throw some kind of ethical point at the end. We’ll call you Shecky Spinoza.”

When my then-girlfriend, a philosophy major in college, tried to get me to bone up on Plato, Kant, and Baruch, I laughed. After all, who needed those guys? By then, I’d been at it a few months, and had already picked up Lesson #1 to success in the expertise game: attitude. It doesn’t necessarily matter if it makes much sense, or even if the expertise on offer proves dramatically wrong. Say it with enough confidence and command, and you’re in. Look how long Lyndon Johnson kept listening to his experts on Southeast Asia, or Enron to “the smartest guys in the room”; or consider who Andrew Cuomo has been listening to.

In my case, the gimmick was to dredge up some ethical dilemma from my or some friend’s past—not hard, since we were all 1960s-era vets adept at rationalization—kick it around for 600 or 800 words, then reach the obvious, Ten Commandments-wise, conclusion.

The mail came pouring in from admiring readers, many seeking ethical guidance. As night follows day, there came invites from the morning shows needing five minutes of expert insight into some sticky moral situation in that day’s news. Who else was a harried producer to call when, say, Penthouse hit the stands with photos showing newly named Miss America Vanessa Williams doing scandalous things than, as I’d then been dubbed, Mr. Ethics? One group of midwestern acolytes produced tee shirts reading, “What would Harry Stein Do?”


The media’s tone about this trend is, of course, apocalyptic, with many commentators portraying the Republican governors of these states as callous extremists hell-bent on reopening, come what may. The fact is that states all over the country have been reopening, and California and North Carolina, both with Democratic governors, have seen spikes in new confirmed cases, too (although not dramatically increasing positivity rates). It’s also irksome to see these governors depicted as villains at the same time New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is lionized as a hero, despite New York’s vastly higher death rate and his fateful decision to send COVID-positive patients into nursing homes.

The reality is that Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, and Doug Ducey are reasonable, public-spirited men who never said they would insist on full reopening regardless of the consequences. Abbott has closed bars back down and further restricted the capacity of restaurants. He’s also stopped elective surgeries again in hard-hit areas and will allow counties to mandate wearing masks in public. DeSantis, too, has shuttered bars, while Florida localities are tightening up again on some restrictions. Ducey is hitting the brakes on the state’s reopening process.

All of this seems prudent. They are following the evidence and adjusting to new data. We like the local watering hole as much as the next guy, but if bars are contributing to the surge of cases, it only makes sense to close them again. Bars and restaurants also should not be allowed to flout state and local guidelines. And masks, which more Florida localities are mandating, are a mild mitigation measure compared with shutting business and telling people to stay at home.


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference in Tallahassee Monday afternoon to announce the signing of the next fiscal year's budget.

DeSantis began speaking shortly after 1 p.m. after signing a $92.2 billion budget at the Florida Capitol and making $1 billion in vetoes.

"This budget reflects a steadfast commitment to Floridians by safeguarding important investments in key areas including education, the environment, infrastructure, public safety and more," DeSantis said.

The governor said his "goal was try to safeguard the historic achievements that we were able to do, while also realizing historic savings, so we could put Florida on a more solid fiscal foundation."

Among the cuts he outlined included $550 million from his own budget plan, including $20 million for the Job Growth Grant Fund.

"As the reality changes, I think we all have to recognize that none of us are going to get everything we want," said DeSantis.

DeSantis highlighted that the state's budget includes $500 million to increase the minimum teacher salary and an additional $100 million for salary increases for more experienced teachers.

The budget includes investments in Florida's environment and water quality and provides more than $625 million for Everglades restoration and water resources.

"Nobody has ever made more vetoes than I did right here," said DeSantis. "I'm convinced we'll be able to weather the storm."


early four months into the COVID-19 crisis, we are witnessing continued evidence of not just cost in lives lost but the economic devastation as well, with the new surge in cases in states previously spared casting doubt on everything from the opening of theme parks and sporting events to the viability of interstate travel. And yet, as bad as things are economically, it remains an open question why things aren’t worse. The answer is simple, and challenging: we may all be in this together as humans facing a virus but we are not equally in this together in bearing the economic toll.

We are not all in this together, by class or, as the recent protests amply highlight, by race, but we have a story in this country that says we are, and that story subtly shapes how we tell our economic narrative as well. We act as if the fact that many of us are hard hit means that the system must therefore be as well. And make no mistake, a less-bad economy in the age of COVID-19 is still a very bad one. But it is not an equally distributed less bad, just as it was not an equally or even equitably distributed good when times were better. The upside to that downside is that the system itself isn’t as harshly impacted; the downside is that the brunt hits those least able to bear it.

The national unemployment rate is likely at about 15%, given that 20 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, and the number who are underemployed is considerably higher. You would think that would translate into an economy-wide catastrophe, but while specific industries have been devastated, overall economic activity has not declined in sync with job losses. The sharp hit during April has been followed by a sharp rebound in many industries. Retail sales increased 17% in May and are only down 6% from May of 2019, which is bad but nowhere near as extreme as the job losses or the catering of air travel and the shuttered movie businesses for instance. New home sales in May not only rebounded from their April crater but were up from May of 2019, which is rather extraordinary given how challenging things are now and how robust the economy was a year ago.

And of course, then there is the stock market, which is up nearly 40% from the lows in March and as of late June is down about 5% year to date for the S&P 500. Markets have one benefit that no person has: the backstop of the Federal Reserve, which is committed to supplying almost endless liquidity in order to ensure no repeat of the 2008-2009 financial collapse. It is undoubtedly a good thing that the financial system is not currently imperiled, but it creates an even starker contrast when 20 million Americans are receiving unemployment benefits and millions more not even seeking employment.

Markets aside, why aren’t those tens of millions out of work having a more immediate negative impact? Why isn’t there an echo of the Great Depression when some of the numbers are Great Depression-like?


I’m moving my business headquarters off the West Coast. We tried San Francisco. We tried the Seattle area. Both were wonderful in their own ways, especially in natural beauty and personal friendships. But both have become hostile to the principles and policies that enable people to live abundantly in the broadest sense.

That’s why my company is in the final stages of purchasing office space in Austin, Texas. By the end of the year, I hope to move dozens of employees to the Lone Star State and to be ready to hire hundreds more.


All of these arguments assumed that lockdowns would have enough of an impact on virus transmission to justify the huge burdens they imposed. But it is by no means clear that they did.

Cellphone data show that Americans were already moving around less before they were legally required to do so. Nationwide, driving, walking, and use of mass transit fell precipitously in early March, before any of the lockdowns. That downward trend continued until late March, when Americans started moving around more, even as they were still subject to lockdowns. The same basic pattern was apparent even in states, such as Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, that never issued stay-at-home orders. Foot traffic data show similar trends: a sharp decline beginning in early March, followed by an increase beginning in late March and early April.

It is possible that lockdowns accelerated the downward trends in mobility and delayed or attenuated the upward trends. But the data suggest that the trends were driven mostly by voluntary changes in behavior. It is also possible that foreclosing certain options when people ventured outside their homes reduced virus transmission even when they started doing that more. In states with broad business closure orders, many people were not going to work, and no one was allowed to go inside bars or restaurants for drinks or food. It seems reasonable to expect that such restrictions would reduce virus transmission to at least some extent.

Yet in Texas, where a statewide lockdown was imposed on April 1, that order had no obvious impact on the number of new COVID-19 cases reported each day, which continued to trend upward through April. And after the stay-at-home order expired on April 30 and businesses began to reopen, more than a month went by before there was an explosion in cases, even though the median incubation period for COVID-19 is four or five days.

Houston writer Mimi Swartz, in a New York Times op-ed piece published yesterday, blames Phase 3 of Gov. Greg Abbott's reopening plan, which "allowed many businesses to reopen at 75 percent capacity on June 12." The timing seems right, since daily new cases began to rise precipitously four or five days later. The number jumped more than threefold between June 16 and June 25, from 2,622 to nearly 6,000, before falling slightly to 5,357 yesterday.


All of these arguments assumed that lockdowns would have enough of an impact on virus transmission to justify the huge burdens they imposed. But it is by no means clear that they did.

Cellphone data show that Americans were already moving around less before they were legally required to do so. Nationwide, driving, walking, and use of mass transit fell precipitously in early March, before any of the lockdowns. That downward trend continued until late March, when Americans started moving around more, even as they were still subject to lockdowns. The same basic pattern was apparent even in states, such as Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, that never issued stay-at-home orders. Foot traffic data show similar trends: a sharp decline beginning in early March, followed by an increase beginning in late March and early April.

It is possible that lockdowns accelerated the downward trends in mobility and delayed or attenuated the upward trends. But the data suggest that the trends were driven mostly by voluntary changes in behavior. It is also possible that foreclosing certain options when people ventured outside their homes reduced virus transmission even when they started doing that more. In states with broad business closure orders, many people were not going to work, and no one was allowed to go inside bars or restaurants for drinks or food. It seems reasonable to expect that such restrictions would reduce virus transmission to at least some extent.

Yet in Texas, where a statewide lockdown was imposed on April 1, that order had no obvious impact on the number of new COVID-19 cases reported each day, which continued to trend upward through April. And after the stay-at-home order expired on April 30 and businesses began to reopen, more than a month went by before there was an explosion in cases, even though the median incubation period for COVID-19 is four or five days.

Houston writer Mimi Swartz, in a New York Times op-ed piece published yesterday, blames Phase 3 of Gov. Greg Abbott's reopening plan, which "allowed many businesses to reopen at 75 percent capacity on June 12." The timing seems right, since daily new cases began to rise precipitously four or five days later. The number jumped more than threefold between June 16 and June 25, from 2,622 to nearly 6,000, before falling slightly to 5,357 yesterday.



The rot began in America’s universities before spreading to mass media, cultural magazines, philanthropies, museums, and corporations. More and more parents are concerned that it now suffuses K-12 education. They don’t want a Pollyanna history, but neither do they want their children indoctrinated with a grim, doctrinaire view that America is an evil nation, incapable of reforming its own defects.

Universities have led this parade of self-flagellation. One reason is that so many administrators and professors agree with the mob demands. The second is that prudent faculty and staff know where the risks lay. Their careers would be endangered, perhaps terminated, by resisting the bullhorns and barricades. The smart career move is to affirm the most strident cries, publicly renounce your old (and now wrong) views, apologize on bended knee, and hope you will not be sent to the rice paddies to learn from the peasants’ wisdom.

Can anything be done? Yes. And it should begin in universities, where so many of the problems began.

Universities must publicly reassert the first principle of academic inquiry: free and open debate is essential to research and learning. Bad arguments should be rebutted with better ones, bad data and methods with better ones. How do we know which arguments, data, and methods are bad? Only through vigorous debate.

To understand why this approach is so crucial, ask yourself: Why is social science so dreadful in the People’s Republic of China and other totalitarian states? Because the “wrong” answers lead to dismissal, dishonor, and even death. Knowing that, the best scholars avoid those fields altogether. Even if their current views are approved, they might be forbidden tomorrow and these scholars will inevitably face political restraints in searching for answers to important questions. Those restraints and their consequences are well known. It is madness to impose them on ourselves.

In the midst of this full-scale assault on free speech, have universities issued full-throated defenses of open inquiry as the foundation of education? No. Hillsdale College in rural Michigan has done so, and perhaps a handful of “Bible schools,” but they are rarer than Republican professors of English literature. What almost all universities have issued are vapid letters, reaffirming their commitment to “diversity and inclusion.” Many have said they will pump more money into those projects, which they have already sustained for decades. They say nothing about intellectual diversity, which they don’t consider diversity at all.

The men who declared American Independence in 1776 get their due respect in the history books. But often, many of the men and women who helped earn that independence are forgotten. Here are 11 of the unsung heroes who made huge contributions to the American Revolution.

1. William Dawes

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem only immortalized one of the two brave men who rode through the night on April 18, 1775, to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of possible arrest. After learning that the British were preparing to march on Lexington, Dr. Joseph Warren sent Paul Revere to cross the river in a rowboat while Dawes was responsible for slipping past the British sentries who guarded the land bridge connecting Boston to the rest of Massachusetts. Ultimately, both men made it, with Revere beating Dawes to Lexington by half an hour, so Dawes’ act of equal bravery is often overlooked.

2. Dr. Joseph Warren

Warren did more than just dispatch Revere and Dawes—he was a steadfast supporter of the Revolution in his own right. After the passage of the Townsend Acts in 1767, Warren wrote a series of inflammatory articles for the Boston Gazette under the pseudonym “A True Patriot” that got him and his publishers accused of libel. He was responsible for raising the militia in Boston and was elected second general in command of the Massachusetts forces by the Provincial congress on June 14, 1775. Despite his position of command, he went into battle along with the rest of the militia and was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

3. Crispus Attucks

This escaped former slave is generally considered to be the first American to die in the Revolution. He was working as a merchant seaman in Boston when Samuel Adams called on colonists to demonstrate against the British troops guarding the customs commissioners. In what became known as the Boston Massacre, 40 to 50 patriots armed with clubs and sticks were fired on by British troops, with Attucks as the first casualty.


On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. 

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” 

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s 

Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level 

We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. 


Betelgeuse—a gigantic star in the final stages of its life—has been acting weird lately, exhibiting dramatic drops in brightness. New research attributes enormous star spots to Betelgeuse’s flaky appearance, though on a scale never seen before.

New research set for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint available here) connects dramatic luminosity drops on Betelgeuse to gigantic blemishes within its photosphere, the portion of a star’s surface that shines brightly. These dim, cool spots on Betelgeuse are reminiscent of sunspots, but they cover as much as 50% to 70% of the dying star’s surface. The new research was led by astronomer Thavisha Dharmawardena from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star located about 650 light-years from Earth. Set in the Orion constellation, it’s easily visible to the naked eye. A mind-boggingly big star, Betelgeuse has the mass of 11 Suns and a diameter equal to about 1,700 Suns lined up in a row). If you placed Betelgeuse at the center of our solar system, it would extend all the way out to Jupiter’s orbit. Wow.

Betelgeuse is at the end of its life and could explode in a supernova basically at any time. It’s classified as a semi-regular variable star because its luminosity fluctuates over time, which is not unusual for red giants.


Researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center have developed eye drops that could prevent vision loss after retinal vein occlusion, a major cause of blindness for millions of adults worldwide. 

A study, in mice, suggests that the experimental therapy—which targets a common cause of neurodegeneration and vascular leakage in the eye—could have broader therapeutic effects than existing drugs.

The study was published in Nature Communications.
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