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Current as of July 14, 2020, at 7:30 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 - 1.51%

  • Covid fatality rate in FL 15-24 years old - .02% (less than 1%) 
  • Covid fatality rate in FL 25-34 years old - .04% (less than 1%) 
  • Covid fatality rate in FL 35-44 years old - .20% (less than 1%) 
  • Covid fatality rate in FL 45-54 years old - .42% (less than 1%) 
  • Covid fatality rate in FL 55-64 years old - 1.16%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL 65-74 years old - 4.4%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL 75 and up - 14.4%
  • 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 - 15% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 19%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 23%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated:
July 13, 2020 10:15 PM PST

121
vaccines are in development

12
are now in clinical testing


...[Sunday] Florida set a new record when  it reported the highest single day increase in coronavirus cases  by any state since the outbreak. This jarring announcement requires a significant amount of analysis, but let us first get the hysteria out of the way.

Florida hit an alarming one-day high on Sunday with 15,300 new coronavirus cases, shattering both the state and national record for new cases reported since the start of the pandemic. With Sunday’s staggering surge in new cases, Florida eclipsed New York’s coronavirus peak of 12,274 cases on April 4 .

...While that number does make the eyes pop open there is some sound reasoning behind it. Florida has this spike in caseloads as a result of a massive explosion of tests being conducted. The sharp increase arrived as over 135,000 tests were conducted on Saturday, so yes, while more cases are recorded it is a result of widespread testing.

So the cause and effect are explainable. Here is where things get more encouraging. While the amount of tests mushroomed the positivity is actually decreasing as a percentage. 

Over the past 3 days Florida has conducted well over 300,000 tests. During this same period the infection rate has steadily dropped. 

This has to be considered good news, as it is taking a much broader search to come up with the caseloads. The contagion appears to be dropping in intensity and herd immunity is clearly in development. More positive news for the state is to be found when we look at the rates of infection and deaths as a result.

Since we are comparing the new spike in cases to other states you can see how well Florida is managing the pandemic in comparison to those others. Per 100,000 people Florida records 1,178 cases, and under 20 deaths. By comparison New York City has double the cases and over  ten times  the deaths; 2,626-277/100K. Elsewhere New York State shows 1,636-78/100K, Massachusetts 1,614-120/100K, and Arizona 1,672-130/100K. 

All of this new increase follows the national trends,  as shown here at The Covid Tracking Project . Testing is surging, and the confirmed cases are also sharply on the rise, but hospitalizations are climbing at a lower rate. Meanwhile the death count – which the media loves to tally without context — is progressively dropping sharply at the same time. This is evidence of herd immunity taking effect. 

We are gradually coming through the harsh effects of the pandemic and slowly the country is developing its needed resistance. We may not be out of the clutches yet but there are indications that the clearing is becoming visible.


Many years ago, one of my duties as a young surgical intern was to fill out  death certificates  for recently deceased patients. Under “cause of death,” Part I asked for the immediate cause, other conditions leading to it, and the underlying cause. Part II asked for “other significant conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause given in Part I.” If you think this is confusing, you’re right. Did the post-operative patient found dead in bed really die of a heart attack, a pulmonary embolism, or some operative complication, like bleeding? Where do you list their colon cancer or hypertension?

The task has not gotten any easier during the Covid-19 pandemic. People are still dying of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and accidents. But now there is a new respiratory illness to account for. Not every decedent who tested positive for the virus that causes Covid-19 died from it—in fact, the disease is mild for most people. Conversely, some deaths due to Covid-19 may be erroneously assigned to other causes of death because the people were never tested, and Covid-19 was not diagnosed. Nearly everyone dying of Covid-19 has  concurrent health problems —the average decedent has 2.5 co-morbid conditions—and hypertension, heart disease, respiratory diseases, and diabetes are among the most common. The presence and interaction of these co-morbid conditions is what sometimes changes Covid-19 from a relatively benign disease into a killer. But co-morbidities can also cause death regardless of Covid-19.

A common way to distinguish the mortality burden of a new infectious agent from other causes of death is to estimate the excess deaths that occurred beyond what would be expected if the pathogen had not circulated. A recent  study  of 48 states and the District of Columbia estimated 122,300 excess deaths during the pandemic period of March 1 to May 30, compared with expected deaths calculated from the previous five years. Deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 accounted for 78 percent of the total; approximately 27,000 deaths (22 percent) were not attributed to Covid-19. A second  study , using the same database with different statistical methods for the period March 1 to April 25, found that 65 percent of 87,000 excess deaths were attributed to Covid-19.

Only part of the discrepancy between excess deaths and official Covid deaths results from undercounting of Covid deaths. In New York City, when excess deaths between March 11 (the first recorded Covid-19 death) and May 2 were  examined , only 57 percent had laboratory-confirmed Covid-19. Yet when probable deaths—deaths for which Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, or an equivalent term was listed on the death certificate as an immediate, underlying, or contributing cause of death, but that did not have laboratory confirmation of Covid-19—were added in, 22 percent of excess deaths were still not attributed to Covid-19.

The indirect effect of the pandemic—deaths caused by the social and economic responses to the pandemic, including lockdowns—appears to explain the balance. For instance, people delayed needed medical care because they were instructed to shelter in place, were too scared to go to the doctor, or were unable to obtain care because of limitations on available care, including a moratorium on elective procedures.

Inpatient admissions nationwide in VA hospitals, the nation’s largest hospital system, were  down 42 percent  for six emergency conditions—stroke, myocardial infarction (MI), heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, appendicitis, and pneumonia—during six weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic (March 11 to April 21) compared with the six weeks immediately prior (January 29 to March 10). The drop was significant for all six conditions and ranged from a decrease of 40 percent for MI to 57 percent for appendicitis. No such decrease in admissions was found for the same six-week period in 2019. These emergency conditions did not become any less lethal as a result of the pandemic; rather, people simply died from acute illnesses that would have been treated in normal times.

Deaths from chronic, non-emergent conditions also increased as patients put off maintenance visits and their medical conditions deteriorated. In the second study of excess deaths, the five states with the most Covid-19 deaths from March through April (Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), experienced large proportional increases in deaths from non-respiratory underlying causes, including diabetes (96 percent), heart diseases (89 percent), Alzheimer’s disease (64 percent), and cerebrovascular diseases (35 percent). New York City—the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter during that period—experienced the largest increases in non-respiratory deaths, notably from heart disease (398 percent) and diabetes (356 percent).

Cancer diagnoses were delayed for months as patients were unable to obtain “elective” screening procedures. For some, this will result in more advanced disease. Diagnosed cancer cases—normally treated with surgery or inpatient medical treatments—were treated with outpatient treatments instead. While some oncologists rationalized that the results might be just as good, physicians were clearly deviating from the standard of care.

The lockdowns led to wide unemployment and economic recession, resulting in  increased drug and alcohol abuse  and increases in  domestic abuse  and  suicides . Most studies in a systematic  literature review  found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicides. Data from the 2008 Great Recession showed a strong  positive correlation  between increasing unemployment and increasing suicide in middle aged (45–64) people.  Ten times  as many people texted a federal government disaster mental-distress hotline in April 2020 as in April 2019.

As we consider how to deal with resurgent numbers of Covid cases, we must acknowledge that mitigation measures like shelter-in-place and lockdowns appear to have contributed to the death toll. The orders were issued by states and localities in late March; excess deaths peaked in the week ending  April 11 .

Reopening began in mid-April, and by May 20 all states that had imposed orders started to lift restrictions. In June, as the economy continued reopening, excess deaths waned.

Our focus must be on ensuring that the health-care system can simultaneously treat Covid-19 and other maladies and reassuring patients that it is safe to seek care. Otherwise, today’s young physicians will have to start entering a new cause of death on death certificates—“public policy.”


Florida physician Leo Valentin says health experts and media elites looking at total coronavirus cases on the rise in recent weeks are missing at least half the story when guiding policymakers considering a second wave of lockdowns to curb the spread of the novel Chinese virus.

“Discussing case levels without discussing testing levels is misleading,” Valentin told The Federalist in an exclusive interview, emphasizing that “our testing increase must be any part of any serious analysis or comparison.”

Cases are indeed on the rise in at least 35 states, according to  data  compiled by Johns Hopkins University. As of this writing, more than 3.3 million Americans have been infected by the virus, and more than 135,000 have died. Testing capacity however, has also been ramped up in many parts of the country leading to a higher case count as health officials identify more infected patients.

Valentin said that while the total number of cases play a role in determining death rates and clusters, the ages of those infected also play a “huge component of the fatality ratio.”

“All of these factors allow us to accurately interpret morbidity and mortality. Number of cases without context, such as demographic and severity, doesn’t tell us the whole story,” said Valentin, a Harvard-educated physician who is also seeking the Republican nomination in the race for Florida’s 7th congressional district.

Valentin said the original intent of the lockdowns in areas with health care capacity concerns in order to flatten the curve served their purpose, noting that the “‘most important numbers’ now, will not necessarily be the important numbers tomorrow.”

“Right now, I suggest we fully understand what hospital capacity means and real availability of resources is (i.e. surge capacity). Let’s also look at infection fatality ratio and hospital capacity–particularly ICU capacity,” Valentin said. “Interventions, such as ‘lockdowns,’ should be last resort, transitory and tied to [infection fatality rates] and health care capacity, recognizing that these interventions have real consequences: delayed treatments for other serious conditions and socioeconomic effects which are tied to health care outcomes. These interventions can and will increase overall fatality rate.”

When asked about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ approach, Valentin said his governor “did exactly what needed to be done early on,” striking a fine balance between implementing lockdown measures and protecting vulnerable populations with a targeted data-driven approach. DeSantis avoided authoritarian orders covering the entire state that forced thousands of infected patients into  nursing homes  as Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo did in New York.

While cases are on the rise in Florida, its overall case load not only remains just more than of New York’s total cases, but its death rate is a fraction of the Empire State’s. More than 32,000 people have died from the virus in New York with 1,666 deaths  per million . In Florida, nearly 3,000 have succumbed to the virus giving the state a death rate of nearly 200 deaths per million. As of last week, more than  6,400  New York residents have died in nursing homes, more than double the number who have died in the entire state of Florida.

When it came to re-opening schools, a position aggressively being pushed by the Trump administration to get children back to classrooms, Valentin said he supported the idea citing the fact that for children, “risk is extremely low.” Valentin maintained however, as have Education Secretary  Betsy DeVos  and the White House that each community is subject to different circumstances so reopenings ought to be data-driven with districts dealing with resurging cases as needed.

Valentin also raised concerns over politicians and health officials celebrating some gatherings such as mass protests in the name of social justice while condemning others. In June for example, dozens of public health experts penned an open  letter  in support of the George Floyd protests declaring the coronavirus woke-sensitive while maintaining that other large gatherings should remain banned.


As the country attempts to reopen amid the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, one easy way we can help reduce the spread of the disease is using face masks. But policymakers—such as those in California and in some cities—are exactly wrong to mandate them.

Policymakers and public health officials should  encourage the use of masks , but should absolutely  avoid mandating them . Mandating mask use could turn this lightweight solution into yet another onerous burden on the American people during the pandemic response.

A broad, untargeted mandate, and its requisite enforcement, will end up punishing Americans for violations of a public health measure in many situations that have zero public health implications.

It’s important here to distinguish government from private businesses, which are well within their rights to implement mask requirements to patronize their shops and stores. In fact, it’s prudent to do so in businesses that require prolonged close contact, such as salons or retail stores.

One of the major missteps in the early pandemic response was public health messaging that stated that face masks were not effective in preventing disease, and the general public was encouraged not to purchase surgical masks for themselves.

No less than Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that this early messaging was meant not to protect the public, but rather to  preserve the supply of masks for health care providers. 

That  goal of ensuring provider access  to protective equipment is laudable, but Americans from the start should have been trusted with clear, concise, and transparent information and messaging, and trusted to act accordingly. That’s the only way to build trust and cooperation with the public, especially on such a simple measure as wearing a face mask.

That said, as a doctor, I encourage Americans not to dismiss using face masks. Increased testing throughout the country has shown that, even after a month or more of multiple statewide lockdown orders,  tens of thousands of new cases still occur daily .

Because of how fast the disease spreads, preventing its transmission requires  a multitude of measures . But they need to be appropriate and balanced.

The time is over for harsh measures—such as stay-at-home orders, which forbade most Americans from going to work, from attending church services, from going to bars and restaurants, and from otherwise participating in normal activities that make us feel like normal human beings.

Those measures were enacted to stanch the exponential spread of the virus, but because of their heavy-handed nature were never realistic long-term solutions.

A much less burdensome solution, then, is necessary to continue fighting the virus while resuming some parts of normal daily life. The use of face masks is a solution that has very low cost and a light imposition on the lives of individual Americans.

Even if they aren’t showing symptoms, masks will let more Americans go out and resume more normal lives. We know that masks are an easy way of reducing transmission of COVID-19 in confined or indoor spaces, but otherwise have little effect in outdoor open spaces. 

For instance, their use is not necessary in areas with little close contact, such as driving alone in your car or walking on an uncrowded biking trail.

Americans should want to choose to wear them—at the right time and in the right places—because they will help us interact in safer ways with vulnerable people at high risk of dying from the disease (e.g., the elderly and those with certain underlying medical conditions).

So, for example, wearing a mask means that we are taking steps to help our grandparents be—and feel—safe going out in public.

COVID-19 spreads by breathing out, and—based on the best information we have now—putting a physical barrier of any sort in the path of a person’s respiratory expulsion limits the travel and spread of that expulsion.

That’s the reason surgeons wear masks during procedures. It’s not to protect the mask-wearing surgeon, but to protect the patient from the surgeon’s respiratory particles.

Of course, if you’re sick, you still need to stay home. Regular cloth masks, and even surgical masks, do not stop transmission of the disease.

We also need to be clear-eyed about the reliability and limitations of this information. Current evidence with regard to face masks and COVID-19 is largely sparse, and guidance to wear masks is based on  clinical experience  and  data from prior experiments  with similar viruses.  

That doesn’t mean we should to wait to wear masks until we have hard evidence in a randomized, controlled trial. That would throw out commonsense in pursuit of evidence-based policy and needlessly impede the public health effort to prevent the spread of disease.

At the same time, it also means policymakers must have great humility with regard to mask-wearing policies.

The restrictive lockdown measures were a heavy burden on the American people, and policymakers must not turn mask-wearing into a similarly heavy burden with mandates and enforcement. The mask-wearing mandates are already resulting in reflexive defiance and can further undermine the already tenuous and increasingly shaky trust that public health officials hold with the public.

Masks right now appear to be a highly effective, low-cost measure in the fight against COVID-19. Everyone should consider that, but  lawmakers must not ruin it.

The U.S. federal budget deficit in June surged to $864 billion from single digits a year earlier amid continued strong spending on coronavirus relief programs and a drop in individual and corporate tax receipts, the Treasury Department said on Monday.

The June deficit brought the year-to-date fiscal deficit to $2.7 trillion, far eclipsing the previous full-year record of $1.4 trillion in 2009.

Some analysts forecast a gap as high as $3.8 trillion for the fiscal year to Sept. 30.

Outlays were up 223% to $1.1 trillion, a record increase for any month,  the report said . The bulk of the June's jump in outlays was $511 billion for the government's Paycheck Protection Program, set up in April and designed to keep small businesses afloat by funding loans that are forgivable if certain criteria are met.

A senior Treasury official told reporters that under U.S. government accounting rules, the funds were recorded as spent in June even though Treasury has not yet paid out for forgiveness of those loans and not all may be forgiven.

June receipts fell 28% to $241 billion, a reflection of job losses due to the coronavirus pandemic but also this year's extension of the tax filing deadline to July from April. 


“Under communism, individuals are merely a means to be used toward the achievement of the ends of the collective nation-state. Thus, individuals can be easily sacrificed for the nation-state’s goals.”
So said national security adviser Robert O’Brien in a major policy speech June 24 to a group of business executives at the Arizona Commerce Authority, adding:
Individuals do not have inherent value under Marxism-Leninism. They exist to serve the state; the state does not exist to serve them.
In marked contrast to Marxist-Leninist ideology, individuals in a free market democracy control the fruits of their own labor and initiative. They are empowered and entitled to pursue their dreams by means of their own free choice.

Indeed, the discussion of freedom to choose has at its core consideration of the relationship between the individual and the state. As a vital component of human dignity, autonomy, and personal empowerment, liberty is valuable as an end unto itself.

Just as important, however, is the fact that freedom provides a proven formula for economic prosperity and societal progress. It’s ultimately about moving societies forward for the benefit of a greater number of people.

As documented in The Heritage Foundation’s annual  Index of Economic Freedom , societies with higher degrees of economic freedom thrive because they capitalize more fully on the ability of individuals to innovate and prosper.

Economies rated “free” or “mostly free”  enjoy  incomes that are more than twice the average levels in all other countries and more than five times higher than the per capita gross domestic product of “repressed” economies.

The pursuit of, and commitment to, free market policies clearly pave a proven way to more vibrant growth and greater prosperity.

In fact, history tells us that the human spirit thrives on fairness, opportunity, transparency, and liberty.
We were vividly reminded of this truth by the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago. Yet there are those who persist in attacking individual freedom in the name of collectivism or socialism.

These false and outmoded ideologies may still have emotional and political appeal for some. However, the economic and social consequences when they become the touchstones of government policy are unambiguous; namely, poverty, deprivation, and oppression.

Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek once observed:
To build a better world, we must have the courage to make a new start. We must clear away the obstacles with which human folly has recently encumbered our path and release the creative energy of individuals. We must create conditions favourable to progress rather than ‘planning progress.’ … The guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.
That observation resonates astonishingly well in today’s world. It would be a tragic mistake to abandon our commitment to freedom in a time of uncertainty. That  freedom  has unequivocally made our society strong, vibrant, and flourishing.

It’s time to revitalize our commitment to individual freedom and pursue  a policy of liberty.

Max Alvarez left Fidel Castro’s Cuba alone as a 13-year-old in 1961. Now, he’s warning Americans not to give up on the freest country on earth.

“What is happening in our backyard today, I experienced as an 11-year-old,” said Alvarez in a video that’s since accumulated 2.6 million views on Twitter. “I remember vividly all the promises that a guy named Castro gave, and how 99 percent of the people swallowed the pill.”

Alvarez told his story  during  a roundtable discussion with President Trump on Friday about supporting the people in Venezuela and Cuba without condoning their leaders’ regimes. He compared the socialism that’s increasingly popular among the American left to Castro’s communism. “Socialism is nothing but communism during Halloween,” he said.

“I remember all the promises that we hear today about free education, and free healthcare, and free land,” he added. “But my God…no freedom.”

Alvarez  fled  Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan, a Catholic Welfare Bureau program that helped over 14,000 children leave communist Cuba in the early 1960s. “I wasn’t even coming here,” he says; he was originally on his way to meet his brother in Spain. When his brother died, Alvarez stayed in the United States. Now, “almost 60 years later, I’m sitting next to the president of the United States talking about the American dream.”

After arriving in the U.S. as a teenager, Alvarez went to Florida State University and worked for Citgo before  buying  a few failing gas stations and starting his own business. Now, he’s the owner of Sunshine Gas Distributors, with hundreds of gas stations in Florida.

There’s “no other country in the world where you can start a business from the trunk of your car,” he says, “and within a very few years — with hard work, commitment, and all the core values that we learn from this very culture of ours — we can become…those people who make the next generation better than the one before.”

Alvarez is adamant that coming to the United States was the “greatest blessing I ever had.”

“We were provided an opportunity. This is what makes our country great,” he says. “They didn’t give me free nothing — they gave me the opportunity, that is the most valuable thing in the world.”

After a few years, his parents were able to leave Cuba and join him in South Florida. It wasn’t the first time Alvarez’s father had fled communism; he’d come to Cuba from Spain at age 18 to escape the spread of communism there. Alvarez says his father only had a sixth-grade education, “but I think he was the greatest philosopher I ever met.”

“He used to tell us how lucky he was because he was able to come from Spain to Cuba, and then he came from Cuba to the United States,” Alvarez says. He concludes his story by sharing the advice his father gave him when he graduated college. “Don’t lose this place because you’ll never be as lucky as me,” his father warned him. “If you lose this place, you’ll have no place to go.”

President Donald Trump is pressing state and local officials to  reopen schools  this fall, despite  coronavirus infections  surging nationwide. While experts say there are significant social benefits to resuming in-person classes, they caution that schools will need to balance those against potential risks to provide a safe learning environment for students — as well as teachers and administrators.

Evidence suggests that children are not as susceptible as adults to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Even among those who have been infected, it's relatively rare for children to develop serious complications or require hospitalization.

But this doesn't mean classrooms can be exempt from social distancing and other safety precautions, particularly if  schools intend to welcome kids back on site  in less than two months.

"It really shouldn't be a debate of getting kids back to school, but getting kids back to school safely," said Dr. Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at NYU Langone Health in New York.
Having kids  physically present in schools in the fall  as much as possible would be an "ideal situation," Lighter said, but schools will need to implement policies that allow students to maintain some distance indoors and avoid close contact for prolonged periods of time. This could include decreasing class sizes, rearranging desks to ensure kids aren't clustered together or facing one another and moving gym classes or other recreational activities outdoors, she said.

In the U.S., children make up about 22 percent of the population, but kids account for only 2 percent of coronavirus cases so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It's not yet known what accounts for that disparity, said Dr. C. Buddy Creech, an associate professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

"This has been a strange pandemic because usually for respiratory viruses, children are the first and most substantially affected," Creech said. "This has really been a flip of that, where it's our adults, and particularly older adults, that have been more affected."

It's also unknown how and why the risks aren't the same for all young people. There are signs that adolescents — particularly those with pre-existing conditions — are at similar risk of infection as adults, though more research is needed, according to Dr. William Raszka, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine.

"The younger you are, probably the less likely you are to be able to transmit the disease," he said. "Once you get to high school age, you're going to be a little bit more concerned, [and] once you're in college age, you're going to be a lot concerned."

Schools will have to keep these differences in mind as they craft their  safety procedures , Lighter said.
"I don't think it's one size fits all," she said. "Young children are really a different risk category than older adolescents, so the guidelines that we have for elementary [and] middle school children should probably be different than the ones that we have for our high school students."

In Europe and the U.S., it was reported that some children infected with the coronavirus experienced inflammatory symptoms similar to Kawasaki disease, a result of the child's immune system essentially kicking into overdrive. More than 100 cases of the complication, dubbed multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children or MIS-C, were reported in New York, which was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in North America in March and April. Though potentially deadly, Lighter said MIS-C is "exceedingly rare."

She added that in some circumstances, it may be important for schools to reopen because these institutions have important social functions, beyond just providing an education.

"I think children have had significant social and emotional concerns from online learning over the past several months," Lighter said. "I don't think online learning works very well for children, especially young children, and especially children that are in poverty."

Dr. Shilpa Patel, a New Jersey-based pediatrician, said it's challenging to make predictions because scientists are still learning about the virus. But she said she has no hesitations about letting her kids return to school this fall.

"Nothing will be normal until we get a vaccine," Patel said. "These are trying times that we're living in, but yes, I will send my kids back to school in September."


In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department. We in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.

It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships, such as the Nazi condemnation of “Jewish” science, or the Stalinist campaign against genetics led by Trofim Lysenko, in which literally thousands of mainstream geneticists were dismissed in the effort to suppress any opposition to the prevailing political view of the state.

Or so we thought. In recent years, and especially since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to “cultural studies” journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.

In June, the American Physical Society (APS), which represents 55,000 physicists world-wide, endorsed a “strike for black lives” to “shut down STEM” in academia. It closed its office—not to protest police violence or racism, but to “commit to eradicating systemic racism and discrimination, especially in academia, and science,” stating that “physics is not an exception” to the suffocating effects of racism in American life.

While racism in our society is real, no data were given to support this claim of systemic racism in science, and I have argued elsewhere that there are strong reasons to think that this claim is spurious. The APS wasn’t alone. National laboratories and university science departments joined the one-day strike. The pre-eminent science journal Nature, which disseminates what it views as the most important science stories in a daily newsletter, featured an article titled “Ten simple rules for building an anti-racist lab.”

At Michigan State University, one group used the strike to organize and coordinate a protest campaign against the vice president for research, physicist Stephen Hsu, whose crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability—something that to the protesters smacked of eugenics. He was also accused of supporting psychology research at MSU on the statistics of police shootings that didn’t clearly support claims of racial bias. Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign.

At Princeton on July 4, more than 100 faculty members, including more than 40 in the sciences and engineering, wrote an open letter to the president with proposals to “disrupt the institutional hierarchies perpetuating inequity and harm.” This included the creation of a policing committee that would “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty,” with “racism” to be defined by another faculty committee, and requiring every department, including math, physics, astronomy and other sciences, to establish a senior thesis prize for research that somehow “is actively anti-racist or expands our sense of how race is constructed in our society.”

When scientific and academic leaders give official imprimatur to unverified claims, or issue blanket condemnations of peer-reviewed research or whole fields that may be unpopular, it has ripple effects throughout the field. It can shut down discussion and result in self-censorship.

Shortly after Mr. Hsu resigned, the authors of the psychology study asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science to retract their paper—not because of flaws in their statistical analysis, but because of what they called the “misuse” of their article by journalists who argued that it countered the prevailing view that police forces are racist. They later amended the retraction request to claim, conveniently, that it “had nothing to do with political considerations, ‘mob’ pressure, threats to the authors, or distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly.” As a cosmologist, I can say that if we retracted all the papers in cosmology that we felt were misrepresented by journalists, there would hardly be any papers left.

Actual censorship is also occurring. A distinguished chemist in Canada argued in favor of merit-based science and against hiring practices that aim at equality of outcome if they result “in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.” For that he was censured by his university provost, his published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal website, and two editors involved in accepting it were suspended.

An Italian scientist at the international laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, had his scheduled seminar on statistical imbalances between the sexes in physics canceled and his position at the laboratory revoked because he suggested that apparent inequities might not be directly due to sexism. A group of linguistics students initiated a public petition asking that the psychologist Steven Pinker be stripped of his position as a Linguistics Society of America Fellow for such offenses as tweeting a New York Times article they disapproved of.

As ideological encroachment corrupts scientific institutions, one might wonder why more scientists aren’t defending the hard sciences from this intrusion. The answer is that many academics are afraid, and for good reason. They are hesitant to disagree with scientific leadership groups, and they see what has happened to scientists who do. They see how researchers lose funding if they can’t justify how their research programs will explicitly combat claimed systemic racism or sexism, a requirement for scientific proposals now being applied by granting agencies.

Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress suffers. This was the case in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—and in the U.S. in the 19th century when racist views dominated biology, and during the McCarthy era, when prominent scientists like Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. To stem the slide, scientific leaders, scientific societies and senior academic administrators must publicly stand up not only for free speech in science, but for quality, independent of political doctrine and divorced from the demands of political factions.

Georgetown University has given all its faculty, including me, the option to teach in the classroom or remotely via computer during the fall semester. Even though my age places me in the high-risk category, I’ve elected to teach in person. I feel I have an obligation to do so.

Covid-19 is a fact of life. There is no alternative to learning to live with the risk of infection as generations before us lived with similar dangers. My father used to describe what it was like living with the risk of disease when he was a boy before antibiotics. My older relatives told me what it was like living with the risk of polio before the Salk vaccine. Covid-19 is part of our environment. The only options we have are to take reasonable precautions and get on with life or to hide from it.

For the past four months, I have watched people younger than myself risk infection for my benefit. People who are often the age of my students have kept grocery stores open for me, cooked and delivered food to my home, worked in warehouses, loaded and driven trucks to deliver packages to me, worked in meat-processing plants and other links in the supply chain to ensure that I have what I need for a comfortable life, and worked in hospitals so that I can get treatment if I get sick. I would feel ungenerous if I were unwilling to run some risk of infection myself to provide my services to them.

Teaching university and law students doesn’t qualify as an essential service, as that term is currently defined. But I wouldn’t be a professor if I did not believe that there was significant value in higher education. Given what the younger generations have done for me, I believe that I have a responsibility to give them the best learning experience I can, and that means being in the classroom with them.
I don’t believe the risk of teaching in person is an unreasonable one. In my opinion, Georgetown University is exercising an unreasonable amount of care to protect its students, faculty and staff against the virus. As a torts professor, I teach my students that we all have a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect others against harm from our actions. Reasonable care consists of taking precautions to avoid harm whenever “there is some real likelihood of damage” that would be apparent to “a reasonably prudent mind.” An unreasonable level of care would be to expend resources on additional precautions that do little or nothing to further increase safety.

My observations of Georgetown’s preparations for the fall semester indicate that the university is taking not only all reasonable precautions, but also several unreasonable ones that will cause inconvenience without significantly improving safety—for instance, requiring professors to wear masks while teaching, even if they’re on a podium far from any student.

And it is important to be on campus. I have taught at Georgetown for many years, and hope to continue teaching there for many more. For me, missing one year in the classroom is not much of a sacrifice. But my undergraduate students have only four years in college and my law students only three in law school. I have clear memories of how personally meaningful and fleeting those years are, of how much emotional growth and character development takes place though interactions with classmates and faculty.

My current students have already lost several months of this precious time. It looks as if they are destined to lose more. I feel obliged to minimize that loss as much as I can by providing them with as close to a normal educational experience as possible under the circumstances. The least I can do is be in the room with them.

I understand why my colleagues, especially those in high-risk categories, would choose to teach remotely. My comments reflect only my own evaluation of risks and rewards and are not intended as criticism of those who’ve made a contrary decision. But when classes start up again in August, I will be at the podium, ready to look my students in the eye, which is all that will be visible above their masks, and get back to work.