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Current as of Sept. 29, 2020, at 7:00 a.m. |
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COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
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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.
Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19
Data Sources
Data Sources on Social Media
Other Resources
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Current Statistics
- Fatality rate in Florida - 2.0%
- Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
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15-24 years old - .03%
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25-34 years old - .07%
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35-44 years old - .23%
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45-54 years old - .53%
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55-64 years old - 1.7%
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65-74 years old - 5.6%
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75 and up - 17.5%
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Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%
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Median age of new Covid cases - 41 years old
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Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 15% decrease
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ICU beds available in Florida - 27%
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Hospital beds available in Florida - 28%
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Vaccine Tracking
Last updated: September 25, 2020 1:36 PM PST
212
vaccines are in development.
34
are now in clinical testing.
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President Donald Trump on Monday announced plans to distribute millions of Abbott Laboratories' 15-minute COVID-19 tests in the coming weeks, a move aimed at expanding access and helping reopen schools that are seen as key to getting parents back to work.
The federal government will send out 6.5 million rapid tests to governors this week and expects to ship 100 million tests over the next several weeks, based on states' populations.
The White House will encourage states — which have ultimate discretion over how to deploy the tests — to use the tests to screen teachers, check symptomatic children to see if they have contracted the virus, or conduct baseline surveillance, Bloomberg News reported.
Trump said in a Rose Garden announcement that 50 million tests would be provided to help the most vulnerable Americans, with 18 million sent to nursing homes, 15 million to assisted living facilities, 10 million to home health and hospice care agencies, and nearly 1 million to historically Black colleges and universities and those associated with tribal nations.
Health and Human Services Assistant Sec. for Health Adm. Brett Giroir demonstrated the ease with which the nasal swab test can be administered.
The test has been lauded as a breakthrough by public health officials. A single-use device about the size of a credit card, the test provides results within just 15 minutes without using any laboratory equipment, so it can be administered almost anywhere.
The upcoming shipments come from an order of around 150 million BinaxNOW tests the federal government previously arranged to buy. The purchase from the U.S. represents almost all the tests Abbott plans to produce this year...
Abbott has said it would scale its production capacity to 50 million tests per month by October and that it could currently produce "tens of millions" of the tests, indicating it will take at least a few months for the tests to be fully distributed to states and territories.
Imagine the panic our medical overlords, hand-wringing politicians, and a complicit media could create if they started treating the common rhinovirus like they are treating COVID-19 right now. For starters, maybe they change the name to something super-scary sounding, like COVID-20 (shudder). Then they start shouting from the hilltops about how deadly this thing is. To prove it, they start a massive ultra-sensitive testing regime whereby anyone with a scratchy throat is gaslit into getting a test, for which tens of thousands a day test positive and are subsequently quarantined for weeks. Finally, anyone who tests positive and dies, no matter how old or how sick they were and, if they recovered, no matter how far after recovering from COVID-20 their death occurred, is included on a daily “death count” that is published and reported on in every major media outlet seemingly every hour of every day. Given the infectivity and stubbornness of highly contagious respiratory viruses as well as the natural tendency of elderly people to die, this “death count,” and particularly the "case count" would literally be unending and probably reasonably steady for a long period of time, if not forever.
Obviously, you don’t have to imagine the panic that would ensue and the severity of the response, because we’re experiencing it every day of this 7-month-old dystopian nightmare, and there’s no end in sight. I outlined the scenario above because, as you’ve probably guessed, we could play that game with most any highly contagious virus, no matter how lethal or benign, and still just as easily convince Joe Biden to hide in his basement with his face muzzle wrapped around his eyeballs like a mummy.
Granted, COVID-19 is more dangerous overall than a common rhinovirus, especially to certain high-risk groups who by now know to be extra careful. But it’s also LESS dangerous than the flu to most others, particularly children and younger adults. Still, it’s difficult to know right now exactly HOW dangerous it is because we simply can’t trust their numbers, much less anything else that comes out of their lying mouths.
Remember the brouhaha over the news that only 6% of those who die with COVID-19 actually die FROM COVID-19 alone, that 94% have some sort of comorbidity in addition to the virus? Now, people on our side made a lot of hay over this, and I’ll admit some of it wasn’t entirely fair. A 55-year-old with asthma who dies after contracting coronavirus, for example, obviously should be listed as a COVID death, and it’s unfair to suggest otherwise. However, when we’re talking about cases like the 89-year-old who died in Milwaukee this month of “COVID-19” according to a death certificate that also lists dementia, hypertensive & atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and chronic renal failure, it begins to strain credulity. Or how about the 91-year-old female who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and dementia, or the morbidly obese 76-year-old with chronic renal failure, diabetes mellitus, and asthma?
Sure, the motorcycle accident “COVID deaths” make the news from time to time, but it increasingly seems like the people who were on their last legs already are the real death-count drivers here. For example, Fox News aired a report last week on what has been uncovered in Milwaukee County, and it’s beyond stunning.
Specifically, 410 out of 422 deaths attributed to COVID-19 occurred in patients with potentially deadly underlying conditions. Forget 94% - this is 97%, and most had at least two to three, if not five or six underlying, potentially deadly comorbidities. And even more striking, several weren't even tested before being listed as having had the virus based on symptoms alone, yet ALL had COVID-19 listed as a cause of death. When you add that to the fact that COVID death count procedure is to count everyone who dies at some point after contracting COVID-19 as a COVID-death regardless of whether or not they recovered from the virus infection itself, again, it’s hard to trust their numbers.
So, on the one hand, the hand that appears to be winning the policy debate right now, there are those who want COVID-19 to be essentially blamed for any death even remotely associated with the virus. It’s difficult to say what their motivations are, besides loving raw power and wanting to hold onto as much of it for as long as possible.
If cornered, they’d probably say they legitimately view the virus as an existential threat and see no harm in overstating the actual threat if it convinces people who may not otherwise take precautions to follow orders and mandates without question. This was likely the Nashville mayor’s ‘logic’ for failing to reveal the low COVID numbers tracked to bars in order to keep a lid on arguments against their continued closure. Of course, the problem with distorting reality like this is that there are other consequences, to livelihoods, to societal norms, to human-to-human interactions, and even to public health and ultimate mortality.
On the other hand, there are certainly some who want to downplay the virus and pretend it doesn’t exist and/or that it’s not dangerous. I’ve been accused of this, as have many others on ‘Team Reality,’ but for me and all the legitimate truth-tellers I know... it’s an unfair charge.
We know the virus is real and that it’s dangerous. However, we also know that it’s not dangerous to the majority of humans, and there are ways to protect and treat those to whom it IS dangerous without destroying the economy, crushing freedoms, and undermining society with useless measures like mandatory mask mandates.
Yes, it does appear that there have been excess deaths this year. Just how many have been caused by the disease itself versus the lockdowns, delayed medical treatments, suicide, depression, and other factors? It’s hard to say at this point. However, it’s also true that the vast majority of those who died of COVID would have likely been dead either this year or by the end of 2021. If not COVID, for many it would have been the next cold or flu that came their way.
For pointing this out, we’re accused of not caring about the elderly. But it’s entirely possible to care about the elderly and take reasonable steps to protect them, and also understand that there is a difference between the death of someone with decades left to live and that of someone in hospice with stage 4 cancer who already had a prognosis of two weeks. The Spanish flu killed 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States. The average age of death was 28 years old. Compare this to COVID, for which the median age of death is at or greater than the average human lifespan (yes, young people can die, but again it’s at a rate lower than the flu). Obviously, it’s a tragedy to anyone who loses a loved one, as is any disease that takes someone even a few hours before they should have gone. But let’s not pretend it’s the same thing, because it’s not. A disease that took children would be far more feared than COVID-19 is, and for good reason.
The truth is, in two years COVID-19 will be a statistical blip when it comes to the number of people alive on the planet. Yet, the damage and suffering we have caused with our overbearing response could last for decades.
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“When Americans vote in November, unemployment will be below 6%,” declared Lars Christensen, a maverick economist, in May. Given that lockdowns had sent the unemployment rate soaring to 14.7% only the month before, it was a bold prediction. In June at least 14 of the Federal Reserve’s 17 interest-rate-setters forecast that quarterly unemployment at the end of the year would still be above 9%. Most other prognosticators were equally gloomy. They expected American GDP to collapse in 2020 and recover relatively slowly. Mr Christensen insisted that natural disasters, unlike financial crashes and recessions brought on by economic policy mistakes, are typically followed by rapid recoveries.
He may be proven right. Over the summer the unemployment rate fell fast, to 8.4% in August. And economists have scrambled to upgrade their growth forecasts (see chart). On September 16th the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, predicted that the American economy would shrink by 3.8% this year, rather than the 7.3% expected in June. The outlook was upgraded across the rich world, but nowhere by as much. America still faces a recession about half as deep again as the one it endured after the financial crisis. But expectations are not as apocalyptic as they were—and look better than they do in most of Europe.
The upgrades in America can be attributed to three factors. First, the spread of the coronavirus in the southern “sunbelt states”, which rode a wave of the epidemic in the summer, has slowed. Second, America’s economic stimulus, the world’s largest both in absolute terms and as a proportion of GDP, has been potent. Thanks to one-time stimulus cheques worth up to $1,200 per person and an extra $600 a week in unemployment-insurance (UI) payments, households’ disposable income has risen since the pandemic began.
Americans did not spend the money all at once, meaning that it continues to support consumption today, even though most of the emergency funding has expired. In early September UI recipients were still spending more than they did before the pandemic hit.
The final reason behind the forecast revisions is probably America’s flexible labour market. The fall in unemployment in recent months seems to reflect mainly the creation of more new jobs, rather than the departure of discouraged workers from the workforce. In Europe governments have tended to assume much of the payroll cost for furloughed workers. Such schemes are handy in a tight spot. But if prolonged, they could keep workers in jobs that are never coming back. America, in contrast, has mainly protected people’s incomes with unemployment benefits (although it has absorbed the payroll costs of many small businesses via loans that may eventually be forgiven). As a result the reallocation of labour from dying industries to up-and-coming ones is happening at speed. For example, the number of travel agents has fallen by 10% since April, even as overall employment has risen. Employment in general-merchandise shops is 6% higher than before the pandemic.
Much could still go wrong. The virus could surge again, as it has in Europe. Many forecasters continue to assume, optimistically, that Congress will pass another stimulus package this year. Americans cannot run down their savings for ever. And social-distancing requirements remain in place in much of the country. As a result some labour-market indicators still look dire. In August, even as the overall unemployment rate fell, roughly 3.4m jobs were permanently culled, more than in October 2008, soon after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The rapid rebound this time could yet hit a hard ceiling. But Mr Christensen’s optimism no longer looks so exceptional.
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Eliza Henderson has been thinking about getting surgery to shrink her stomach and help her lose weight for more than a year. At age 48, she’s 5-foot-3 and weighs 232 pounds, giving her a body-mass index of 41, well over what the National Institutes of Health defines as obese.
Lockdowns forced her to work from her home in Suffern, N.Y., instead of her Manhattan office as a secretary for a drug company. She anxiously consumed snacks, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and beer with her husband, gaining 10 pounds. When public-health officials began warning that obesity and the related problems of diabetes and hypertension were among the biggest risk factors for Covid-19, Ms. Henderson asked her doctor to schedule a gastric sleeve surgery for Oct. 19.
“Nothing is granted, your time is your time, but I don’t want my being obese to stack the odds against me with something like coronavirus,” said Ms. Henderson, who has two grown children and an 8-year-old daughter. “More than anything, I want to have a better chance to survive.”
As hospitals ramp up elective surgeries after several months of pause amid the pandemic, patients are flocking to sign up for procedures such as gastric bypasses, laparoscopic bands and gastric sleeves that restrict the size of the stomach and alter signals between the stomach and brain. When these procedures—part of the category of medical procedures known as bariatric surgery—are successful, they can dramatically reduce a patient’s body weight within months. Many patients hope the weight loss will help them avoid a serious or even fatal case of Covid-19.
Federal health officials urged hospitals on March 18 to put off elective and nonemergency surgeries. While most elective surgeries are seeing a rebound, few have been as dramatic as weight-loss surgeries, which fell nearly to zero in April, but by June had rebounded to a higher level than the same month a year earlier, according to claims data from Perception Health, a Nashville, Tenn.-based health-care data company.
Doctors across the country say they are seeing big increases in intake numbers and patients signing up for the surgeries as the public sheds fears about the safety of hospitals—and as more people begin to view weight loss as a matter of life or death.
“The pandemic has been a real wake-up call,” said Matthew M. Hutter, a surgery professor at Harvard Medical School and president of the American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. “We’ve realized that patients with obesity are at much higher risk for serious cases of Covid-19, including ICU visits and intubation, and even death.”
Dr. Hutter said his clinic has seen an uptick in patients signing up for obesity treatments in recent months, but the volume of bariatric surgeries at Harvard hasn’t reached the same level as last year—likely the result of fewer patients with insurance coverage because of job losses during the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, he said.
Scientists think Covid-19 is particularly dangerous to obese people in part because the coronavirus enters the body through the ACE2 receptor, an enzyme found both in cells that line the lungs and in fat tissue, making patients carrying extra body weight more vulnerable to a high viral load. Obesity also is associated with shortness of breath and hyperinflammation, both of which make it harder for the body to fight off viral infection.
“The virus frankly has an easier job” replicating itself in obese patients, said John Morton, head of the bariatric practice at Yale Medical Center in New Haven, Conn. “It has more targets.”
Bariatric surgery volume rose about 20% once Yale’s five hospitals reopened to elective surgeries in June, compared with a year earlier, Dr. Morton said, and the momentum has continued through summer. Clinical inquiries about the surgery are also on the rise, he said.
“Some of the hip and knee stuff has not kept up, orthopedics has been slower, same thing with spine surgeries,” Dr. Morton said. “The only two surgeries that have been Covid-proof have been cancer and bariatric.”
Surgeons performed about 250,000 bariatric surgeries in 2018, mostly gastric sleeves, in which typically more than 75% of a patient’s stomach is removed and rejoined to create a narrow, banana-shaped cavity.
With a smaller stomach and altered hormonal signals between the gut and the brain, patients feel sated after consuming less food, which reduces overeating and results in rapid weight loss in the months after surgery.
Data showing how many patients are signing up for bariatric procedures are hard to find—most surgeries show up only in claims databases months after the surgery is done—but heads of surgical practices at major hospitals say they have seen a surge in patients enrolling in the weight-loss programs that many insurers require before agreeing to pay for the surgery.
“It’s come back really strongly in June or July,” said J. Tod Fetherling, Perception Health’s chief executive, “so we ought to see a surge through the fall.”
UnitedHealth Group’s Optum health-care arm, which owns surgery centers and medical practices across the country, says it saw a 26% annual increase in patients enrolling in bariatric-surgery programs during the summer. Insurer Cigna Corp. says that prior authorizations for bariatric procedures, which fell 38.3% annually from March to May, rose 9.3% annually in June, July and August.
At the Cleveland Clinic’s Ohio hospitals, patient intake for severely obese patients seeking bariatric surgery jumped 40% annually during the summer, according to Ali Aminian, director of the clinic’s Bariatric and Metabolic Institute. Meanwhile, demand for other elective surgeries at the hospital system hasn’t fully recovered, a spokeswoman said.
“We’ve had patients who wanted to come and take care of their obesity, to be healthier, and when we ask them, why did you come now? It’s because they’ve heard this message that it’s a risk factor for Covid infection,” Dr. Aminian said.
In a new clinical study currently under peer review, Cleveland Clinic found that patients with obesity who had previously had bariatric surgery were 25% less likely to be hospitalized after being infected with Covid-19 than obese patients who hadn’t had the surgery. The unpublished study of nearly 400 patients also found that 13% of obese Covid-19 patients in the control group required intensive-care admission and 2.5% of them died, while none of the Covid-19 patients who had previously had bariatric surgery were admitted to an ICU nor died.
In 2019, 12 U.S. states reported an obesity rate of 35% or higher, up from nine in 2018 and six in 2017, the CDC says. Racial disparities also show up: Black adults, who have been hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, suffer from the highest rates of obesity nationwide (39.8%), while Hispanics like Ms. Henderson, who is of Puerto Rican descent, rank second (33.8%). About 30% of white American adults are obese.
Last year, Jordan Brownlow’s doctor told him that if he didn’t get his obesity under control, he would never live to see age 40. At 5’11”, Mr. Brownlow, a 33-year-old state employee who lives in Redgranite, Wis., weighed 435 pounds and suffered from diabetes, asthma and sleep apnea, all either caused by or exacerbated by his obesity.
Mr. Brownlow began a dieting and exercise routine in January in preparation for a gastric bypass surgery, eventually losing 130 pounds. But in mid-March, the hospital put his surgery on pause because of the pandemic.
“I started having very strong second thoughts” about the surgery because of the possibility of catching the virus at the hospital, Mr. Brownlow said. “I can’t afford to get Covid. If I catch it, it’s not going to be pretty. I’m not ready to leave this earth.”
By June, after speaking with his doctors, Mr. Brownlow began to feel more comfortable with the idea of returning to the hospital, and he decided the surgery was more urgent than ever to protect himself from the virus.
In early September he had a gastric bypass and has since lost another 46, bringing his weight to 260 pounds.
He and his wife, Amber, who is also obese, want to have children, but they have become stymied by fertility issues related to his wife’s health. She has been dieting and is now considering bariatric surgery as well.
Bob Brebrick, who performed Mr. Brownlow’s surgery at Aspirus Hospital Center in Wausau, Wis., said he has seen more patients in recent months coming to his surgical practice inquiring about bariatric surgery.
“There’s this idea that, if I’m unhealthy, and I get sick, maybe I’m more likely to experience a serious illness or death. And that’s a reasonable fear,” he said.
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