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Current as of August 14, 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.

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 - 1.6%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .06%
  • 35-44 years old - .20%
  • 45-54 years old - .43%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.3%
  • 65-74 years old - 4.4%
  • 75 and up - 14.7%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 43 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 36% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 19%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 23%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: August 12, 2020 7:39 AM PST

202
vaccines are in development.

24
are now in clinical testing.

Across America, as public schools are choosing to not reopen or to only provide a partial in-person experience this fall, families are struggling to figure out how to ensure their kids get a good education and don’t fall further behind.
The good news is, there has never been another time in America so ripe for school choice. Wouldn’t it make sense if parents could take a portion of the money that state and local governments spend to educate their children and use it to seek alternatives—like private or parochial school, online education, home schooling, co-ops, or other options?

The fact of the matter is, taxpayer dollars spent on public education are meant for the education of students. As such, those dollars should actually fund students, not empty school buildings.

If schools don’t reopen this fall, states have an obligation to ensure children have access to other educational opportunities. On average, taxpayers pay $14,000 a year per child for K-12 public education. Allowing parents the option of taking a portion of that money and using it elsewhere is one significant step toward fulfilling that obligation.

School choice seems like an especially critical option as teachers unions across the country protest school reopenings.

Unions want schools to remain closed until their lists of demands are met, yet many of their conditions have absolutely nothing to do with ensuring the safety of children and teachers during the pandemic.

Demands include such things as forcing landlords and banks to cancel rent and mortgage payments for individuals, keeping private schools closed, and blocking vouchers for school choice.

One egregious example is in Los Angeles, where the LA teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, wants schools to remain closed until the federal government passes “Medicare for All,” police are defunded, charter schools that “compete” with the public schools are shut down, and more taxpayer funding is allocated to housing for California’s homeless, among other demands.

The stipulations are part of what the union calls its “groundbreaking research paper” that outlines necessary conditions for safely reopening schools.”

Speaking about its list of demands, UTLA’s president claimed, “We all want to physically open schools and be back with our students, but lives hang in the balance. Safety has to be the priority.”

Sure it does.

If safety is truly the priority, how does defunding the police ensure the safety of our kids? That just doesn’t pass the straight-face test.

Of course, defunding the police is not a necessary condition for safely reopening schools. Neither are many of the other demands. Instead, some teachers unions are shamelessly using schoolchildren and the reopening of schools as bargaining chips to push their unrelated social policy agenda. True school choice would mean that parents and students wouldn’t have to be held hostage by political demands.

In addition, any plan to reopen schools needs to be centered on teacher and student safety and providing children a quality education. Decisions must be made based on the science and a school district’s ability to consistently follow health and safety protocols, not on the political agendas of special-interest groups.

As a mom, former local school board member, board member of a state board of education, and someone who has worked in education policy for much of my career, I am intimately familiar with issues of school safety as well as the conditions necessary to provide a quality educational experience.

If schools aren’t going to open this fall or plan on offering only an online or partial-classroom experience, the school choice model just makes good sense.

School choice addresses many of the issues we’re facing during the coronavirus and provides better educational opportunities for every student—not just during the pandemic, but for generations of students to come.

As fall quickly approaches, states must work toward making school choice a reality so students don’t fall even further behind. Parents and students need options, and they need them now.


A day after Florida reported a large increase of coronavirus cases due to a laboratory testing dump, the state reported 6,236 new cases, putting Florida on track for reporting under 7,000 cases per day this week, outside of Wednesday’s blip.

With the new cases reported by the Florida Department of Health Thursday, Florida’s total number of confirmed cases is now 557,137 since the pandemic first arrived more than five months ago. The positivity rate, which represents the number of people who tested positive for the first time compared to the overall number of tests reported by the DOH for the day prior, was 9.52% out of more than 78,200 people tested.

The positivity rate has increased this week, however, with Wednesday’s increase was due to a backlog of testing data being submitted to the state, according to the DOH. Health officials agree the rate should be under 10% to show cases are declining.

Florida Department of Health officials said about half of the new cases were from a backlog of testing data from Niznik Lab Corp in Miami. Some of those tests date back to June 23 but had not been reported to the state until Wednesday.

Many people who test positive for COVID-19 will have mild or no symptoms at all, which is why it is important to monitor hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the virus.

On Thursday, the state added 149 new fatalities, bringing Florida’s death toll from the virus up to 9,047. That number includes 8,913 residents and 134 non-residents who died in Florida. New COVID-19 deaths are often delayed in reporting to the state DOH and those new deaths could have occurred within the past few weeks.

As of Thursday morning, there were 6,322 patients currently hospitalized with coronavirus in Florida, according to the state Agency for Healthcare Administration. The Florida Department of Health reported 590 new hospitalizations on Thursday, bringing the overall total to 32,537 since March.

This past Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided a bit of good news for the beleaguered coronavirus economy: Some 1.8 million jobs were added to the economy in July, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 10.2%. Thinking optimistically, an economy with roughly 10% unemployment is a 90% economy — 90% of those in the labor force who want a job have one. Viewed another way, according to payroll data there were 140 million people employed in July. The BLS household survey, which generates the unemployment rate, indicated there were 16.3 million looking for work.

With 140 million working, and with 16.3 million looking, the economy seems to be reknitting itself. Yes, there’s a pulse beat out there. A somewhat unregulated market economy, if left alone, is capable of finding its way during pretty bleak times.

I should emphasize the “unregulated” part of that statement. During these challenging coronavirus times, a host of people seem ready to grab the economy’s elusive steering wheel and have their time as driver. They yearn to exercise political power. Leaving it alone is the difficult challenge to be met by headline-seeking politicians and wannabes. And it’s an election year!

But while this is ongoing, countless ordinary people are figuring out how to make a living, and the result of this effort is what I meant earlier when I referred to the economy knitting back. These are the people who previously ran a restaurant and now operate a food truck or a take-out business. Some are people who worked with diverse service providers that now contract with businesses to provide cleaning and decontamination of premises.

Others who previously worked in offices and managed construction projects are working from home and using drones to provide daily work progress reports. Rather than reknitting, some are knitting a replacement economy from new balls of yarn, while finding ways to get costs down and profits up.

It’s happening all around us, just as the BLS data suggest. It’s stressful and difficult for the majority of people whose livelihoods have changed, but to a degree necessary. When faced with upheaval, making some changes isn’t always a choice. The old law “necessity is the mother of invention” applies in spades. Innovation is often driven by hard times.

As to the current picture, construction activity is getting hot, the real estate market is alive again, manufacturing (especially lumber, textiles, and furniture) is on the rise, and retail sales are making a comeback. Even restaurant bookings are looking better and at a large enough number that many of those hard-hit restaurant workers are back on a payroll. Indeed, folks employed in the hospitality industry made up a significant part of the July employment gains.

Interestingly enough, staying at home seems to be a driver for many people to get into gardening and home improvement. Purveyors of seed are enjoying a hay day, and lumber yards are challenged to keep enough plywood and treated timber on hand to satisfy demand.

Taking a hard look at unemployment claims data indicates that weekly claims peaked at 6.9 million in the week ending March 28 and then fell, hitting 1.5 million claims for the week ending June 20 and stubbornly staying at about that level until Aug. 6, when 1.2 million were filed. The trend is clearly positive. While layoffs remain at a high level — a year ago the weekly average was in the 200,000 range — monthly data on new hires indicate more than 6 million were added to payrolls in May, some 4 million added in April, and 5 million in March.

While the economy is reknitting, it’s still the case that lots of people are longing for better days. There is a lot of suffering going on. The coronavirus is a cruel task master. This is time to give the economy some room to roam, to avoid imposing more restrictions on folks who are trying to rebuild their businesses, and to avoid hitting folks with new taxes, whether they are called tariffs or otherwise. Let’s hope we see a 95% economy by early 2021.

New details emerged Thursday about how hundreds of millions of coronavirus vaccines will be distributed in the U.S. and who will bear the cost.

The U.S. government will pay for the vaccines and their distribution, and is working with commercial health insurers to offer the shots free of charge and without a copay, according to Paul Mango, deputy chief of staff for policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“What we’re hoping is that every American will not only get a free vaccine distributed to many different outlets, but also will not have to pay for the administration of that vaccine,” Mr. Mango said on a call with reporters.

Meantime, a collaboration between the federal government and the health-care industry would handle distribution of the vaccines, Mr. Mango said. The government will announce distributor contracts in the near future, Mr. Mango said.

The Department of Defense may handle sending doses to military personnel overseas, Mr. Mango said.

Because initial vaccine supplies are likely to be limited initially, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said the government will seek to prioritize health-care workers, the elderly, nursing home residents and people at high-risk for illness.

“We are going to be in a better place than anybody almost ever has been with a new vaccine where you already have a lot of doses, but you still have to be thoughtful about how to choose the priorities in the first few months, until we can immunize everybody,” Dr. Collins said.

Dr. Collins said U.S. regulators might green light a Covid-19 vaccine in November or December, but doesn’t expect a decision by October...

The U.S. government has spent more than $9 billion securing hundreds of millions of doses of experimental Covid-19 vaccines. This week, it agreed to pay Moderna Inc. more than $1.5 billion for 100 million doses of its vaccine.

Though the vaccines are still under study, drugmakers have begun making doses to distribute should the shots prove to work safely and building supply chains. The U.S. is on schedule to meet its goal of producing tens of millions of doses by the end of the year, Mr. Mango said.

Government health-insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid will cover the cost of administering shots, Mr. Mango said, and the government is working with commercial insurers to make sure their members don’t face copays.

A new federal fund, created by a federal relief law known as the Cares Act, will provide the shots free of charge to people who don’t have health insurance, Mr. Mango said.

Details of how any distribution system would look—including where Americans might need to go to get vaccinated—remain to be worked out.

A National Academy of Sciences panel that is drawing up a plan for allocating vaccines is expected to issue interim, high-level recommendations by early September, Dr. Collins said.

After that, Dr. Collins said he expects the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assume its normal role making recommendations about who should get vaccinated, and the agency is working on a plan for coronavirus vaccines.


The first three COVID-19 patients treated with a new Israeli “passive vaccine” were released home from the hospital, Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem said Thursday.

The vaccine, developed by the hospital together with Israeli biopharmaceutical firm Kamada, demonstrated rapid, clinical benefit, the statement said.

Passive immunization occurs when a recovered patient gives antibodies to a current patient while active vaccines occur when a patient is inoculated with a dead or weakened strain of an actual virus, prompting the body to generate antibodies.

The hospital has been collecting plasma donations from coronavirus patients in the ultra-Orthodox community, Israel’s hardest-hit population, for the past three months, Hadassah head Prof. Zeev Rotstein said.

Even patients who had not contracted COVID-19 but who nonetheless were found to have high levels of antibodies or antivirus proteins in their blood from having contracted other viruses were asked to donate.

Kamada used the donated plasma to produce what it termed an “anti-SARS-CoV-2 plasma-derived immunoglobulin (IgG) product.”

According to Rotstein, the vaccine also doubles as a medical treatment to be administered to COVID-19 patients who need help in fighting the disease. But he added that it could also be used prophylactically, to stop the progression of the disease even in asymptomatic patients who are at risk.

The Hadassah team is “very satisfied with the clinical research,” Dr. Ada Kessler, a physician in the hospital’s coronavirus unit, said according to The Jerusalem Post.

The donated plasma is being administered to COVID-19 patients who develop pneumonia and “for now, we are very encouraged.”

Approximately 12 patients are currently receiving the treatment.

Earlier this week, Hadassah said it was involved in the development of a Russian vaccine claimed Tuesday by Moscow to be the first in the world that works against COVID-19.

“The Hadassah hospital is involved in the clinical research on the new Russian vaccine. It is being done in Moscow, in Skolkovo at the Hadassah hospital there. We are first of all testing the safety level, it will take time,” Rotstein told Radio 103FM.

The rioting has nothing to do with free speech and peaceful protest. Peaceful protestors don’t loot. They don’t try to burn buildings while barricading the exits. And they don’t aim blinding lasers at police officers’ eyes.  

It’s not enough to just protect federal buildings and those who guard them. Government officials, the private sector, civil society, and the media all have appropriate roles to play in protecting citizens and property.  

Clearly, more needs to be done to restore order in these cities. Their recovery hinges on the restoration of public safety so that residents and businesses can get back to normal, productive day-to-day activities. 

Not surprisingly, the worst violence has occurred in cities where local politicians have at least tacitly supported the rioters. This is completely wrong-headed. Taking criminals off the street and restoring public order must be job number one. And if those committing crimes are part of an organized group, their leaders and organizers, as well as those providing support or funding, should be investigated and held accountable as well. 

For example, many Americans do not know of the Marxist roots beneath the current riots. Thus, objective investigative journalists should examine and broadly report on the statements of the leaders of these groups, as well as their funding and training. It is vital that Americans know the truth about these organizations. 

Obviously, there is much work to be done to stop the immediate violence and destruction, to prevent future anarchy, to inform the American public, and to restore the damaged communities. For that work to succeed, planning is essential. Those plans should encompass four major initiatives: protection; prosecution; communication, and recovery. 

Protection: The first step is to stop the current rioting and prevent future riots. This will require beefing up the presence of supervisory law enforcement. With more commanders on-site, law enforcement will be better able to respond to changes in rioters tactics in real-time. When federal officers are deployed to protect federal property, they should draw a line which rioters will not be permitted to cross, then hold that line with an overwhelming presence. It would be good, of course, to give local police the opportunity to protect their own city by holding that line themselves. 

Law enforcement works best when departments communicate directly across jurisdictions. Local politicians in Portland and elsewhere, however, have thwarted such communication, endangering the lives of their constituents and endangering property.  

The business of the federal government in cities where riots are taking place must continue. Federal agencies and conscientious organizations should pressure local leaders to restore and maintain order near federal buildings to ensure access to the judicial system and federal services for their citizens. If local leaders refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement, then they should not receive future federal grants or discretionary funds for their cities. 

Prosecution: Order demands accountability. Law enforcement and prosecutors must investigate, arrest, and indict those who violate state or federal law. Those who train, fund, materially support or facilitate those found guilty should also be investigated and prosecuted if they, too, broke any laws by doing so.

Rogue state prosecutors who refuse to prosecute criminals should be called out. And, again, jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal officials should no longer receive federal grant money—especially grants earmarked for law enforcement purposes—until they enforce the law as written in a fair and even-handed manner.  

Communication: The media has a responsibility to objectively report the facts so that the American people can see for themselves what is happening in Portland and elsewhere and decide whether such lawlessness should be tolerated. If the mainstream media continue to portray rioters as “peaceful protesters” and blame their violence on the presence of federal officers, the record must be set straight. Law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and community leaders should conduct briefings, present eye-witnesses and release video footage to show what is truly happening on the ground.

Recovery: Once the streets are safe, municipal and state officials can refocus on addressing the ongoing public health crisis and citizens can begin to rebuild their own communities. To accelerate clean up and rebuilding, states and localities should remove as much red tape as possible to help businesses, residents, and schools resume operations.  

Jurisdictions that fail to develop and implement an effective action plan can pretty much resign themselves to many more months of criminal destruction and anarchy. Their law-abiding citizens expect and deserve much better.