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Current as of Sept. 24, 2020, at 7:00 a.m.
COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
  • Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here.

Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step.

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 - 2.0%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .07%
  • 35-44 years old - .22%
  • 45-54 years old - .51%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.7%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.5%
  • 75 and up - 17.3%
  • 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 - 19% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 23%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 24%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: September 22, 2020 9:38 AM PST

212
vaccines are in development.

34
are now in clinical testing.

Johnson & Johnson's potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus entered the final stage of clinical trials, the fourth vaccine candidate to be designated as Phase III by the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed.

Up to 60,000 adult volunteers will be enrolled for the single-dose vaccine trial across 215 clinical research locations, according to the National Institutes of Health. Though months behind other candidates, it is the largest scale trial thus far and may yield sufficient data for results by the end of this year, according to Johnson & Johnson chief scientific officer Paul Stoffels.

“Four COVID-19 vaccine candidates are in Phase 3 clinical testing in the United States just over eight months after SARS-CoV-2 was identified. This is an unprecedented feat for the scientific community made possible by decades of progress in vaccine technology and a coordinated, strategic approach across government, industry and academia,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a statement.

“It is likely that multiple COVID-19 vaccine regimens will be required to meet the global need. The Janssen candidate has showed promise in early-stage testing and may be especially useful in controlling the pandemic if shown to be protective after a single dose," Fauci continued.

Stoffels said the company is preparing to manufacture 1 billion doses of the vaccine candidate for next year. "We're convinced that a single dose could be very efficacious," he said. Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca are also in Phase III clinical trials but require return visits for a second shot to elicit a protective immune response from those enrolled.

President Trump celebrated the "Big news" on Wednesday, tweeting, "Numerous great companies are seeing fantastic results. @FDA must move quickly!"

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar called the Johnson & Johnson development an "extraordinary" accomplishment. “By building a portfolio of candidate vaccines, Operation Warp Speed is maximizing the chances that we will have substantial supplies of a safe and effective vaccine — and maybe multiple vaccine options — by January 2021," he said.

The company plans to recruit individuals above the age of 18 across several countries, the U.S., South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.


Coronavirus deaths in the U.S. have climbed past 200,800, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University. At least a handful of states in the south of the country have each reported a decline in new deaths per capita (100,000 people) in the latest two-week period.

Here we look at five states that have reported the largest drop in new deaths per capita over the last seven days, from the previous week, according to data compiled by The New York Times. All population data below from the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 2019.

Florida

Week-to-week change in new deaths per capita: 243
  • New deaths per capita in week one: 629
  • New deaths per capita in week two: 872
  • Total confirmed deaths: 13,415
  • Total population: 21,477,737

The seven-day moving average of daily new deaths in Florida increased from late March to mid-April before mostly flattening out through late June. It then rose sharply through early August, peaking at 184 on August 5, before mostly declining through September, according to data compiled by Worldometer.

Arkansas

Week-to-week change in new deaths per capita: 174
  • New deaths per capita in week one: 59
  • New deaths per capita in week two: 233
  • Total confirmed deaths: 1,209
  • Total population: 3,017,804

The seven-day moving average of daily new fatalities in Arkansas mostly increased from late March through early September, when it peaked at 19 on September 4. The figure then mostly declined through the rest of the month, according to Worldometer.

Tennessee

Week-to-week change in new deaths per capita: 95
  • New deaths per capita in week one: 134
  • New deaths per capita in week two: 229
  • Total confirmed deaths: 2,236
  • Total population: 6,829,174

The seven-day moving average of daily new deaths in Tennessee mostly flattened out from early April to early July before mostly rising through late August. The figure then sharply declined through early September before rising through mid-September, peaking at 33 on September 15, and dipping through the rest of the month, according to Worldometer.

Cardboard cutouts of people are placed by the counter of a bar, helping people to respect social distancing in Key West, Florida on September 17 amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Florida is among five states that have each seen a drop in new deaths in recent weeks.

Louisiana

Week-to-week change in new deaths per capita: 52
  • New deaths per capita in week one: 108
  • New deaths per capita in week two: 160
  • Total confirmed deaths: 5,386
  • Total population: 4,648,794

The seven-day moving average of daily new fatalities in Louisiana rose sharply from late March to late April, peaking at 66 on April 18. From then, it mostly declined through mid-June before it slightly flattened out through early July. The figure mostly rose again through early August before declining until early September and flattening out after then, according to Worldometer.

Mississippi

Week-to-week change in new deaths per capita: 37
  • New deaths per capita in week one: 112
  • New deaths per capita in week two: 149
  • Total confirmed deaths: 2,846
  • Total population: 2,976,149

The seven-day moving average of daily new deaths in Mississippi have been mostly rising from late March through early August, slightly flattening out between mid-May and early July before peaking at 34 on August 4. The figure then mostly declined through September, according to Worldometer.

The wider picture

The novel coronavirus has infected over 31.6 million people across the globe since it was first reported in Wuhan, China, including nearly 6.9 million in the U.S. More than 971,900 have died following infection, while over 21.7 million have reportedly recovered as of Wednesday, according to JHU.

When it all began, in late February and early March, the world panicked. Much of the terror arose from the possibility that we were facing an apocalyptic-level threat in the form of a virus that could kill a substantial portion of humanity and cut across age groups, threatening everyone on the planet and civilization itself. 

Now we know that this is not an accurate depiction of the coronavirus. Despite misconceptions that persist due to, inter alia, the media’s irresponsible use of anecdotes, failure to provide context and air opposing views, and outright lies, as a medical and scientific question it is now settled that the virus is not particularly lethal, especially to the young and middle-aged. 

It kills fewer children than the annual flu, and for people under 50 years of old, “almost none” will die from the virus. The coronavirus presents a significant risk only to those who are already quite elderly and sick.

New estimates of the infection fatality rate – accounting for recent realizations that substantial deaths were attributed to the virus when, in fact, the person had multiple underlying ailments and it was not at all clear Covid-19 was the actual cause of death — place it at around 0.2%, only twice as great as the seasonal flu. 

And, infection even in high risk groups is much less deadly as a result of medical advances. In fact, deaths have been reduced by about 50% among the seriously ill since March and April, for these reasons. 

Between new understandings about the virus’s lethality or lack thereof, and improved treatments, it has become less tenable to argue that society will collapse absent extreme countermeasures. Thus, a different philosophy has emerged among the pro-lockdown and mask crowd. Rather than saving the world from an apocalyptic virus, this new reasoning is predicated upon the notion that a cost-benefit analysis should be conducted. Whatever harms are caused by continuing to live in partial or total shutdown, wearing masks, and altering our way of life, are less bad than coronavirus deaths, the lockdown advocates say.

As an aside, as I have written before, a properly conducted analysis, considering future harms as well as present ones, indicates that the damage wrought by our extreme approach significantly outweighs the benefits. That is particularly true given that negative consequences of countermeasures, such as business and school closures, and impacts upon mental health, will likely manifest over time. I do not believe that lockdown advocates have adequately considered and weighed the – often unquantifiable – costs.

But I submit that even by engaging in this assessment we have embarked upon a dangerous course. Subjecting the functioning of our basic institutions and the exercising of our liberties to a cost-benefit analysis means that, by the same logic, every flu season we should be crunching numbers and deciding whether living in a state of lockdown would cause less harm than flu deaths. Since 1.36 million people worldwide die per year in automobile accidents, we should probably consider banning vehicular travel.

Annually, 656,000 Americans succumb to heart disease, and 606,000 to cancer. Many of these lives could be prolonged if we mandated daily exercise and forbade consumption of red meat and alcohol. In fact, we could force healthy people to give up a kidney: certainly any suffering caused to the donor would be outweighed by the life that she saved. 

Most people immediately recognize that such ideas — a sort of perverse application of utilitarian philosophy — are ludicrous, inhumane, and contrary to the tenets of liberalism. And rightly so. That is because, implicitly, we understand that certain things are not up for debate, as they are essential to our well-being, both present and future, and to the functioning of society. That includes being able to educate one’s children, earn a living, socialize with friends and family, and breathe fresh air.  

We must reject this approach to the coronavirus, or any contagious disease short of MEV-1 (from the fictional film Contagion). An apocalyptic-level pandemic is very different from one with an infection fatality rate approximately twice that of seasonal influenza, and highly concentrated among the elderly infirm.

Our civilization is threatened not by this virus, but by deeply flawed reasoning in how it ought to be managed. Unless we make clear to our politicians and our fellow citizens that they are wrong, and that our ability to engage in activities and pursuits that are critical to our well-being is not negotiable, we run the risk of leading this diminished existence for the remainder of our lives.

Dogs may become the low-tech new screening tools to make air travel safer during COVID-19. Some airports, like LAX, use temperature screenings to detect passengers who are ill before they pass through security but now, the Helsinki Airport has hired a team of specially trained canines to catch COVID-19.

According to Fast Company, dogs are well-known for their ability to sniff out many diseases. Recently British researchers were awarded a contract to train bio-detection dogs as a rapid-testing measure for COVID-19. The U.K. government partnered with the Medical Detection Dogs charity and several universities to develop the program.

“When you have a disease, whether it’s a virus or a parasite, it changes the body odor, so you actually smell differently. We’ve demonstrated this already with diseases like malaria, for example,” professor John Logan head of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who is involved in the program, told Euronews.

“And we know for other diseases like certain types of cancers, Parkinson’s, even detection of epileptic seizures or blood sugar levels, that dogs do this with a very high level of accuracy,” he added.
 Researchers at the Veterinary Facility at the University of Helsinki successfully taught their charges to detect COVID-19 from people’s sweat. A total of 16 dogs are now working at Helsinki airport to identify passengers who are infected with the virus, according to International Airport Review.

The canines can detect COVID-19 with as little as a 10-molecule sample compared to current testing that requires 18,000,000 molecules. The results are accessed in minutes, without the discomfort of a nasal swab.

Passengers rub their skin with a wipe which is dropped into a cup. To ensure anonymity, the dogs sniff the cup in an isolated booth, according to Fast Company. Passengers who are suspected of being ill are sent to the airport’s information area.

Researchers said that besides being a valuable tool for airports, COVID-19 screening dogs would also be an asset to nursing homes.

My father’s favorite word of dismissal was “phony.” As a young man, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For him and his fellow reporters, phony was the watchword—an instinct. That period—the late 1930s, going into the war—had the atmosphere of a movie by Frank Capra, who was big on newspaper reporters as everyman types. After the calamitous sucker-punch of the Great Depression, a guy didn’t want to be a sap.

That generation of reporters would rather have died, or moved permanently to Albany, N.Y., than call themselves “journalists.” The term itself was phony. When young Henry Luce, who went on to co-found the Time-Life empire, was just out of Yale, he showed up for his job at the Chicago Daily News (as a legman for the columnist Ben Hecht, who, with Charles MacArthur, would write “The Front Page”), he carried a walking stick and a briefcase. The editor looked him up and down and said, “Ah, Mr. Luce. A journalist, I see.”

The lesson I absorbed as a boy was that the work of reporting called for a disinfected mind that busied itself, with little-guy sympathies and self-effacing clarity, on available facts, collected conscientiously. The ideal was fairness: Let the reader decide. It would not have occurred to my father or his fellow reporters, or to me in my apprentice days at the Buffalo News or the Washington Star, to drape the facts in adjectives and adverbs and attitude. The eye of the city editor (the great Sid Epstein at the Star, for example) was vigilant and scathing: Who gives a damn what you think?

If a sensitive person, or, God forbid, one of us on the newspaper staff, had declared that something or other made him feel “uncomfortable” or “unsafe” or constituted a “microaggression,” the answer would have been an incredulous stare: “So what?” If it happened again: “You’re fired.”

The journalistic paragon of my youth was David Broder, who covered politics for the Star and later moved to the Washington Post. He was everything that a reporter in the old model ought to be: dispassionate, nonpartisan, encyclopedic in his knowledge of his subject. Broder had not a trace of the disabling egotism, ruthless ambition or partisan zealotry that afflict media stars today.

It would be silly to idealize the old journalism, which had its problems, including excessive deference to authority and massive sins of omission in the scope of its curiosity; anyway, it belonged to a different world. But it had this virtue: The work, subduing the ego of the reporter, implied respect for the independent mind of the reader.

Alas, the independent, nonpartisan mind went out of fashion years ago in politics, media, academia and even corporate life. Emphasis on the integrity of individual judgment has all but disappeared in the face of identity politics, the religion of diversity and the radical corruption of American universities—the effect everywhere intensified by this year’s obsessive and, one might say, compulsory racialism. America won’t be an honest country until those influences have been defeated or have burned themselves out. It may take years, a generation or two.

For now, in the annus insanus of 2020, we are afflicted by a pandemic of media phoniness. Plastering the facts with attitude—tilting the story to the party line, moralizing it, sentimentalizing it, propagandizing it—is the way of noisy, distracted cable news and, increasingly, of all media. Not a sparrow falls without the New York Times, in its news columns, telling the reader that the bird was shot by a “white supremacist.” News is laid before the citizen’s mind so packaged and tarted up with a narrative line that the simple facts are often impossible to discern.

This is not honest reporting but garish, partisan fabulation. Its object is not to inform, or to encourage reflection, but to stimulate feelings. Let not the listener or viewer or reader be detained by thought but instead move briskly on to emotions, which are the addictive and highly profitable drugs in which big media traffic. News media become crack houses of information and, all the while, ruthless participants in the struggle for political power and for what the parsons on “Morning Joe“ call “the soul of America.”

Journalism’s metaphysical decline proceeds parallel to the deterioration of American politics. In both fields, we behold the lingering death of public trust. The energies that flow into the vacuum left by the departure of trust are self-righteousness, violence of mind and an ineffable stupidity—the civic despair and hysteria that have become the style of poor, miserable 2020.