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Current as of Oct. 6, 2020, at 8:00 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 - 2.1%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .07%
  • 35-44 years old - .23%
  • 45-54 years old - .55%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.8%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.7%
  • 75 and up - 17.9%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 42 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 20% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 26%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 27%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: October 1, 2020 9:00 AM PST

213
vaccines are in development.

35
are now in clinical testing.

Nothing is easier than imagining hypothetical threats to humanity that differ so categorically from any that we’ve experienced before that it would be folly to stick to the familiar rules of the game. Earth is in the path of a hurtling asteroid that will within weeks certainly blow our entire planet to smithereens unless the state confiscates on command whatever it needs to quickly build a giant missile to intercept the doomsday rock.

But it’s infantile to mistake a problem unusually challenging for one so unprecedented that many of the foundational rules of society are to be abandoned indefinitely. Just because reality occasionally throws us curveballs with uncommonly large arcs does not mean that we, upon encountering such a curveball, should treat it as a pitch that differs categorically from ordinary ones. We should remain in the batter’s box, adjust as appropriate within the rules, and do our best to hit such a pitch as we would any other. We should not suspend the rules of the game in order to enable the oncoming ball to be blasted with bazookas.

No reader in October 2020 will have trouble guessing the phenomenon to which I allude with this baseball analogy. The novel coronavirus might well be novel in a medical sense, but it does not confront humanity with a novel threat, one that differs categorically from many that we’ve confronted earlier. Covid-19 is, instead, a curveball with an uncommonly large arc. Nothing more. This virus is emphatically not the existential peril that many people – especially those in the media and those holding (and seeking) political power – make it out to be.

Six Times More Dangerous than the Flu

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Covid-19 is estimated to be “about six times as deadly as the seasonal flu.” In order to account for the (hardly as yet confirmed) assertions that many people who are not killed by Covid will nevertheless be left by it with long-lasting debilitating ailments, let’s estimate Covid’s danger as being 12 times that of the flu. Are we close to a doomsday-asteroid scenario?
No. Not remotely.

My George Mason University colleague Bryan Caplan, blogging at EconLog, asked this sensible question: “If coronavirus is ten times worse than flu, perhaps we should make ten times as much effort to combat it, not a thousand times?” Substituting “twelve” for “ten,” I ask the very same question.
What efforts do we exert to combat the flu? Very few, despite the fact that the flu annually kills, in the U.S. alone, tens of thousands of people. Individuals with flu-like symptoms go to their doctors. Many of these individuals also take some time off of work and take some medications. Governments do little beyond encouraging people to get seasonal flu shots, which many people get (while many others don’t).

A worthwhile research project for some graduate student or assistant professor would be to calculate an estimate of the monetary measure of society’s average annual effort undertaken in response to the flu. This figure can then be compared to the total size of the response to Covid. I don’t dare here guess the details of what such research would turn up, but I’m quite sure – as in willing-to-bet-my-pension-against-one-dollar sure – that the magnitude of the response to Covid is many multiples of 12 times the effort routinely devoted to combating the flu. Bryan Caplan’s suggestion that the response to Covid has been 1,000 times greater than the response to the flu seems to me to be, if anything, too conservative.

A Curveball, Not a Doomsday Rock

Upon noticing the uncommonly large arc of this Covid curveball, many people panicked and saw not a ball thrown in a somewhat different way but, instead, a doomsday asteroid bearing down on them with unprecedented lethality. They therefore uttered no protest when the umpires suddenly pushed them out of the batter’s box, locked them in the clubhouse, and then blasted away at the curveball madly with bazookas.

This categorically different response – the wholesale obliteration of once widely respected rules – the exercise by government officials of never-before-used discretionary power – the still-prevalent fear-mongering without context or perspective – might be justified if Covid truly does pose to humanity an existential threat. But this hysteria and tyranny do not begin to be justified as a response to a virus that is estimated to be about six times as deadly as is the flu. No sensible person would have complained about a response to Covid six times – or even 12 times – more intense than is the normal response to the flu. But sensible people do complain – loudly and with justification – about the wildly disproportionate response to Covid.

A thoughtful and proportionate response to Covid would have been far more nuanced than what we actually suffered. Such an approach would have involved, for example, the identification and protection of especially vulnerable groups, most notably the elderly. This response would also have put more trust in individuals to exercise personal responsibility at choosing how much protection each person desires. And the relatively few individuals who kept their heads and warned against the appalling overreaction, as well as against the kooky defenses of it, would at least have been heard with open minds rather than mindlessly demonized as enemies of humanity.

Too many people over the past six months have taken leave of their senses. We, our children, and our grandchildren will long live with the consequences of this foolish panic – consequences that almost surely will inflict on humanity harms far worse than any that Covid could possibly have ever inflicted.

The U.S. economy was resilient in the third quarter, with sales and growth powering higher despite the persistent coronavirus pandemic, increased uncertainty about the future and Congress' inability to pass another spending package to help struggling small businesses and unemployed workers.

Driving the news: Bank of America on Monday revised its third quarter growth forecast to 33%, up from 27%, and just below Goldman Sachs’ recently revised forecast for a 35% jump, up from 30%.
  • While both are well above the Wall Street average (consensus is for 25.9% growth, per FactSet), the two heavyweights' lofty predictions highlight a theme of improved expectations.

What happened: Even with fewer businesses open and social distancing restrictions in place, Americans increased their spending significantly, especially on vehicles, furniture, home renovations, electronics and at big box retail stores.
  • August's U.S. retail sales report showed a 2.6% increase from August 2019 and total sales for the June–August 2020 period were up 2.4% from the same period a year ago.
  • June and July's increases were thanks largely to direct payments and enhanced unemployment benefits paid by the government, but even after they expired Americans kept spending.

What we're hearing: "I have been surprised that we have continued to recover with the horrific death toll that we have seen in the United States and about 40,000 [COVID-19] cases a day at the moment," Chicago Fed president Charles Evans said during a virtual speech to the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) conference.
  • "We seem to be powering through some horrific personal costs and we're just going to have to see how that plays out and what the toll will be on consumer confidence going forward."

Yes, but: Concern is shifting to the fourth quarter and beyond, as economists are writing down Q4 and full-year expectations.
  • "The big bounce is largely mechanical, and the road will be more difficult from here," S&P Global analysts said in the latest global macro update, provided first to Axios.
  • "Momentum is already beginning to fade. Challenges include protecting those hardest hit, keeping viable firms afloat, and facilitating necessary structural change."

The big picture: Most economists and strategists still expect U.S. and global GDP to be sharply negative for the year — even BofA projects the U.S. economy will contract 3.6% overall in 2020.
  • Others like NABE and S&P revised up their 2020 expectations to smaller contractions but reduced their outlooks for 2021.

The historically elevated U.S. personal savings rate likely helped consumers continue spending in August.
  • The rate declined from 17.8% in July, but was still the highest since June 1975, excluding the pandemic-induced jump.

Why it matters: "Consumption drives nearly 70% of the economy, and with many service-oriented businesses only reopened partially, and with high unemployment reducing households’ ability to spend, the engine of the economy [is] impaired," JPMorgan Asset Management chief global strategist David Kelly said in a recent presentation.

By the numbers: U.S. personal income declined 2.7% and disposable income fell 3.2% last month, the Commerce Department reported on Thursday.
  • However, spending still rose for the month and is up 40.3% on a three-month average annualized pace, RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas pointed out in a recent note.

The last word: "The latter is part of the rebound narrative that will likely result in a third-quarter gross domestic product increase that arrives above 30%, while the former clearly indicates that the pace of spending is slowing," Brusuelas said.

Three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for advancing our understanding of black holes.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that Briton Roger Penrose will receive half of this year’s prize “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

Goran K. Hansson, the academy’s secretary-general, said German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez will receive the second half of the prize “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.”

The prizes celebrate “one of the most exotic objects in the universe,” black holes, which have become a staple of science fiction and science fact and where time even seems to stand still, Nobel committee scientists said.

Penrose proved with mathematics that the formation of black holes was possible, based heavily on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Genzel and Ghez looked at the dust-covered center of our Milky Way galaxy where something strange was going on, several stars moving around something they couldn’t see.

It was a black hole. Not just an ordinary black hole, but a supermassive black hole, 4 million times the mass of our sun.

Now scientists know that all galaxies have supermassive black holes.

It is common for several scientists who worked in related fields to share the prize. Last year’s prize went to Canadian-born cosmologist James Peebles for theoretical work about the early moments after the Big Bang, and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering a planet outside our solar system.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.

The other prizes, to be announced in the coming days, are for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

In fact, not only did President Woodrow Wilson fail to speak about his own illness, there are no known records of major speeches ever delivered by the 28th president about the Spanish flu, which killed the equivalent of 2.2 million people in today's population with the median age of death being a tender 28.

The Spanish flu was a greater calamity than COVID-19 in every way and President Wilson got a lot sicker from it than Trump has from this virus. In April 1919, after the worst of the Spanish flu has passed, Wilson contracted the virus in Paris while meeting at the Big Four peace talks about the aftermath of World War I. Rear Adm. Cary T. Grayson described the president as having been "suddenly taken violently sick with the influenza at a time when the whole of civilization seemed to be in the balance."

Wilson never discussed his illness publicly and the country was unaware of the extent of his illness at the time. This silence reflected a broader mentality at the time, an understanding that the ability of human beings to change the arc of a respiratory virus through public policy is extremely limited.

With this in mind, I was curious to research what Wilson had said about the Spanish flu during the 1918 State of the Union address.

That year, the address was delivered on Dec. 2 – just weeks after the peak months of the virus when hundreds of thousands of very young Americans perished. What words of healing and inspiration did he offer? What sort of public policy promises, proclamations, mandates, and restrictions did he announce?

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

There was absolutely no mention or fleeting reference to the Spanish flu in that or any other State of the Union address – or any other major speech for that matter.

It's truly hard to overstate the enormity of this observation, especially looking through today's COVID-obsessed political lens. The State of the Union address was a big deal for Wilson. Ever the show-boater, Wilson was the first president since John Adams to restore the annual address to the prominence of a live in-person speech before Congress. Thomas Jefferson, who felt that the address reeked of European monarchism, began a tradition of mailing in a written report to Congress.

The fact that Wilson failed to mention a word about the virus, even amid the fallout from World War I, speaks volumes. This virus today is not nearly as devastating in terms of the true death toll and years of life lost as the Spanish flu. But still, imagine Trump delivering the address in a few months and failing to mention a word about it?

The reality is that society understood in those days that a respiratory virus, unlike a war, is a God-made plague and that there is little that can be done to mitigate its spread. There is no known method of arresting the spread of a virus and making it disappear. The best we can do is focus on treatment, which is thankfully getting better. Unfortunately, in 1918, they lacked antibiotics and so many other staples of medicine we rely on today.

Rather than educating the public on the best use of vitamins, zinc, hydroxychloroquine and other available remedies, the public health "experts" sold us a bill of goods – that somehow, we could avoid getting the virus by hiding and running forever. We now see that it's foolish to think you could run or hide from or arrest the spread of such a virus.

In past generations, they understood that trying to stop the spread of flu-like viruses is a fool's errand. As Dr. Andrew Bostom, an academic medical researcher and associate professor of family medicine at Brown University, noted on Twitter Sunday, barely anyone remembers the Hong Kong flu of 1968 or that President Johnson was hospitalized with it.

As Dr. Bostom notes, "The adjusted death toll for the '68-'69 Hong Kong flu would be ~265K." A similar dynamic played out in 1957 during the Asian flu, which killed even more people, especially when considering that there are so many more seniors in America today. Try asking your parents if they remember living through those epidemics. Everyone remembers Woodstock in 1968, but very few people remember the Hong Kong flu or Asian flu.

That is because public officials realized that disrupting people's lives would only harm society, not stop the spread of a respiratory virus. As D.A. Henderson, the former dean of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who is widely credited with helping to eradicate smallpox, wrote in a 2009 analysis of the Asian flu, "This was in recognition that they saw no practical means for limiting the spread of infection."

Henderson warned in a paper a few years earlier, "Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted."

Not only have today's leaders repudiated the concept of normalcy, they have turned a national panic and psychosis into a "new normal." And we are continuing to pay for the consequences of '15 years to flatten the curve.'