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Current as of Sept. 11, 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.

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 - 1.9%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .07%
  • 35-44 years old - .21%
  • 45-54 years old - .49%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.6%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.2%
  • 75 and up - 16.6%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 40 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 24% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 21%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 24%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: September 9, 2020, 7:06 PM PST

211
vaccines are in development.

31
are now in clinical testing.

Vaccines may not be the silver bullets we hope for. Kaiser Health News reports that any future COVID-19 vaccine could be much less effective among those suffering from obesity—and their ranks include more than 100 million people in the United States.

Widespread inactivity and unhealthy nutritional habits are at the root of many of our health issues, often starting as childhood obesity. According to the former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, obesity is about to replace tobacco as the biggest preventable cause of cancer.

About 2 million people die each year from obesity and other chronic conditions such as heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and cancer—many of which are wholly or partially preventable. This is almost 10 times the expected 2020 COVID-19 death toll in the U.S.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 60% of adults have a chronic disease, with 40% suffering from multiple conditions. Chronic conditions (including mental illness) now account for over 90% of U.S. healthcare costs. As chronic diseases start at ever-younger ages, including almost half of obesity and prediabetes beginning now in childhood, the lifetime health and financial damage will continue to mount. At some point, this will cost more money than the country can print.

A recent Johns Hopkins study calculated that almost half of federal spending already goes to healthcare—up from under 5% in 1960. Over that same time frame, healthcare costs have increased from 5% of GDP to almost 18%. On average, families now pay more than $5,000 per person on health, beyond employer benefits.

What the government, employers, and families don’t pay for is being passed on to future generations via the national debt. High chronic deficits threaten military spending and other national priorities, and sky-high national debt is itself becoming a growing risk to our security.

Unfortunately, it’s not just adults who suffer. Our public health crisis is being passed along, like a bad inheritance, to our children. As with our fight against tobacco, we need to start young before health habits are set and fates are sealed. Inactive children become obese teenagers, who become adults with chronic diseases. More than 80% of children with unhealthy habits become unhealthy adults.

Besides the costs and the increased susceptibility to diseases such as COVID-19, an unhealthy nation will also have problems ensuring its own national security. For years, military leaders have warned of a looming recruiting challenge: Almost one-third of youth who volunteer for service are ineligible due to obesity.

Yes, the state of our nation’s public health is ghastly. But we can’t just declare the problem unfixable and call it a day. Giving up on this big a challenge means giving up on America. As Gen. David Petraeus said when he arrived in Baghdad in 2007, “Hard is not hopeless.” Working together, this is a war we can and must win.

Forty years of unhealthy trends show that doctors and parents alone are seldom able to persuade children to stop their unhealthy behavior. They need the support of schools to help their children develop better health habits. For example, thanks in part to effective school programs, fewer than 5% of today’s high school seniors are daily smokers, down from nearly 30% in 1976.

Proven models exist to increase physical activity and healthy nutrition cost-effectively throughout K-12: with an integrated combination of wellness policy plans, community partnerships, quality physical and health education, recess, classroom activity breaks, and related evidence-based programs and practices.

In just three years, one such approach in Arizona increased the percentage of fit students from 18% to 78% of all students and reduced childhood obesity across a large Title I K-12 school district, with a high lower-income Latino and Native-American population.

School accountability systems will need to focus more on the whole-child, giving school leaders an incentive to allocate school time and resources to a more balanced school day. Some systems are already moving in this direction, but we need to move much faster as physical education, health education, and recess continue to be cut back.

How do we pay for this? It is increasingly obvious that public and private health plans can benefit financially from early, school-based preventive education, especially as we move away from fee-for-service to more health-outcomes-based payment models. As a result of more aligned incentives, health leaders are stepping outside their clinical silos to address the “social determinants of health.” The health sector can invest in K-12 to help change habits and hold schools accountable, based on health cost savings' return on investment.

K-12 schools are reopening, many of them trying new teaching approaches required for COVID-19. As schools experiment in how to better serve their students’ learning needs, leaders should also ponder how they can better serve children’s needs for a healthy present—and a healthy lifetime.


If your life these days is anything like mine, a pre-pandemic routine that included regular exercise and disciplined eating has probably given way to sedentary evenings on a big chair, binge-watching reruns of your favorite TV series while guzzling chocolate ice cream or mac ’n’ cheese.

But let’s not beat ourselves up about it. Several doctors I spoke with recently said most of their patients and many of their colleagues are struggling to maintain healthy habits amid the anxiety of the pandemic. “The Quarantine 15” (pounds, that is) is a real phenomenon.

The double challenge of protecting our health, including our immune systems, while battling unhealthy temptations “is a struggle everyone is dealing with,” says Dr. David Kilgore, director of the integrative medicine program at the University of California-Irvine.

Well before COVID-19, more than 40% of U.S. adults were obese, which puts them at risk for COVID-19’s worst outcomes. But even people accustomed to physical fitness and good nutrition are having trouble breaking the bad habits they’ve developed over the past five months.

Karen Clark, a resident of Knoxville, Tennessee, discovered competitive rowing later in life, and her multiple weekly workouts burned off any excess calories she consumed. But the pandemic changed everything: She could no longer meet up with her teammates to row and stopped working out at the YMCA.

Suddenly, she was cooped up at home. And, as for many people, that led to a more sedentary lifestyle, chained to the desk, with no meetings outside the house or walks to lunch with colleagues.

“I reverted to comfort food and comfortable routines and watching an awful lot of Netflix and Amazon Prime, just like everybody else,” Clark says. “When I gained 10 pounds and I was 25, I just cut out the beer and ice cream for a week. When you gain 12 pounds at 62, it’s a long road back.”

She started along that road in July, when she stopped buying chips, ice cream and other treats. And in August, she rediscovered the rowing machine in her basement.

But don’t worry if you lack Clark’s discipline, or a rowing machine. You can still regain some control over your life.

A good way to start is to establish some basic daily routines, since in many cases that’s exactly what the pandemic has taken away, says Dr. W. Scott Butsch, director of obesity medicine at the Cleveland Clinic’s Bariatric and Metabolic Institute. He recommends you “bookend” your day with physical activity, which can be as simple as a short walk in the morning and a longer one after work.

And, especially if you have kids at home who will be studying remotely this fall, prepare your meals at the beginning of the day, or even the beginning of the week, he says.

If you haven’t exercised in a while, “start slow and gradually get yourself up to where you can tolerate an elevated heart rate,” says Dr. Leticia Polanco, a family medicine doctor with the South Bay Primary Medical Group, just south of San Diego. If your gym is closed or you can’t get together with your regular exercise buddies, there are plenty of ways to get your body moving at home and in your neighborhood, she says.

Go for a walk, a run or a bike ride, if one of those activities appeals to you. Though many jurisdictions across the United States require residents to wear masks when out in public, it may not be necessary — and may even be harmful to some people with respiratory conditions — while doing strenuous exercise.
“It’s clearly hard to exercise with a mask on,” says Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. “We go hiking up in the foothills and we take our masks with us and we don’t wear them unless somebody starts coming the other way. Then we will put the mask on, and then we take it off and we keep going.”

If you prefer to avoid the mask question altogether, think of your house as a cleverly disguised gym. Put on music and dance, or hula-hoop, Polanco suggests. You can also pump iron if you have dumbbells, or find a cable TV station with yoga or other workout programs.

If you search on the internet for “exercise videos,” you will find countless workouts for beginners and experienced fitness buffs alike. Try one of the seven-minute workout apps so popular these days. You can download them from Google Play or the Apple Store.

If you miss the camaraderie of exercising with others, virtual fitness groups might seem like a pale substitute, but they can provide motivation and accountability, as well as livestreamed video workouts with like-minded exercisers. One way to find such groups is to search for “virtual fitness community.”
Many gyms are also offering live digital fitness classes and physical training sessions, often advertised on their websites...

Whatever form of exercise you choose, remember it won’t keep you healthy unless you also reduce consumption of fatty and sugary foods that can raise your risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension — all COVID-19 risk factors.

Kim Guess, a dietitian at UC-Berkeley, recommends that people lay in a healthy supply of beans and lentils, whole grains, nuts and seeds, as well as frozen vegetables, tofu, tempeh and canned fish, such as tuna and salmon.

“Start with something really simple,” she said. “It could even be a vegetable side dish to go with what they’re used to preparing.”

Whatever first steps you decide to take, now is a good time to start eating better and moving your body more.

Staying healthy is “so important these days, more than at any other time, because we are fighting this virus which doesn’t have a treatment,” says the Cleveland Clinic’s Butsch. “The treatment is our immune system.

Florida bars will be allowed to reopen at 50% capacity starting Monday, state officials announced Thursday.

At the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation Secretary Halsey Beshears issued an emergency order rescinding a previous order that halted the sale of alcohol at bars, an agency news release said.

“In meetings with hundreds of owners of bars and breweries across the state, I’ve heard their stories of struggle, and I’ve observed their serious commitment to making health and safety a continuing priority in their businesses,” Beshears said in a statement. “It’s time that we take this step, and it’s vital that we start moving forward with this sector of our hospitality industry who have endured one of the toughest paths for sustaining a business during this pandemic.”

DeSantis said earlier Thursday he was planning to soon ease restrictions imposed on the state’s restaurants. He told a meeting of restaurant industry executives in Fort Myers that the current limitation of 50% capacity for indoor dining and requiring that tables be kept 6 feet (2 meters) apart seems arbitrary.
“Why 50 and not 40? Why 50 and not 70? And then the 6-foot is not evidence-based, per se. The World Health Organization says 3-foot distance. In Asia, they are doing less than that. I think they do 2, two-and-a-half feet. Europe does less than 6. Are they not doing science or are we not doing science?” DeSantis said.

DeSantis suggested eateries will know best how to govern their behavior as they don’t want to scare off customers by becoming coronavirus hot spots.

“Just have some common sense on how you are doing it,” DeSantis said. He gave no specifics on when the restrictions would be eased, but said it would be soon.

DeSantis also said he supported the European and Brazilian travel restrictions, but they “have served their purpose.”

“I have told the president we would like to see those lifted,” said DeSantis, who is a strong Trump ally. He said he sees no difference if someone travels across the border from Georgia to visit Florida than if they arrive by plane from a foreign country. “I am comfortable with it..."


Small-business optimism is back above the historical average following the end of the coronavirus surge over the summer, which has led to increased earnings and job openings.

The National Federation of Independent Business Optimism Index increased 1.4 points from July to 100.2 in August, slightly above the historical 46-year average.

The group's survey also showed more firms looking to hire and more reporting higher earnings.

“We are seeing areas of improvement in the small-business economy as job openings and plans to hire are increasing," said NFIB chief economist Bill Dunkelberg. "But many small businesses are still struggling and are uncertain about what the future will hold.”

Job growth continues to be strong in the manufacturing and construction industries, for example, but construction owners are having a particularly hard time finding skilled workers. The service sector is the main sector that is lagging due to coronavirus restrictions and is the key to stronger job growth in the coming months.


Florida lawmakers are staring down the prospect of a $5.4 billion drop in revenue over the next two years, a massive slump prompted by the state’s sales tax-driven economy shutting down in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Amy Baker, the legislature’s top economist, delivered the bad — though expected — news to a panel of House and Senate budget-writers Thursday as part of an annual presentation of the state’s three-year revenue forecast, an otherwise routine affair now fraught with concern about the fallout of Covid-19.

“The situation we are dealing with in the state with the budget is really unprecedented,” said Senate Appropriations Chair Rob Bradley, a Fleming Island Republican who ran the meeting. “The set of circumstances and the challenges that we are facing are unusual. We have not seen them before.”

The dire revenue picture comes as lawmakers prepare for the 2021 legislative session, which could start having preliminary meetings as soon as mid-November.

Headed into session, it’s expected that lawmakers will be looking at a $2.8 billion budget gap, a stark departure from the post-Great Recession years that have largely brought Florida budget surpluses...

The state’s revenue picture has been boosted by nearly $6 billion in federal funding through the CARES Act, a stimulus law designed to help states offset coronavirus-related costs, though there have been questions about how states can use the money, and what qualifies as a permissible expense.

Baker said that as Congress mulls another stimulus package, flexibility in how the state can use those federal funds is as important as getting another infusion of cash. The state would like more flexibility than the first round, which had a rigid focus on specific coronavirus-related costs...

In honor of the 19th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office is paying tribute to the heroes who lost their lives and those who saved countless others.

In a video message, several sheriff's employees share their stories as first responders who worked in New York City and Washington, D.C., on 9/11. Among them is retired New York City Police Officer Rudy Bueno, who now works as a Hillsborough County Sheriff's deputy and lives in east Hillsborough County.

"I had a job to do. It wasn't a time for me to ask questions and have doubt. I had a responsibility," said Bueno, who received multiple phone calls the morning of 9/11 to respond to Lower Manhattan following the initial plane crash. After 9/11, Bueno went on to join a squad that lost four officers on that fateful day.

"You can't forget it. You want to forget it, but you can't," said retired New York City Police Sgt. Michael Duran.

Duran now works in the Hillsborough Sheriff's Warrants Section. He was one of many officers at Ground Zero aiding in rescue and recovery efforts immediately following the attacks in New York.

Maintaining security at the Pentagon post-attack was the responsibility of Hillsborough County Patrol Deputy Jacob Garrard, a member of the 3rd U.S. Infantry (the Old Guard) in 2001. Garrard was stationed at Fort Myers, Virginia. He recalls working with the Air Force from the ground that day as the Air Force secured the sky.

"For my generation, it was our Pearl Harbor. It was our Vietnam. It was our moment that I don't think anybody will forget," said Hillsborough Sheriff's criminal intelligence analyst Christine Freitas. She continues to serve her community after retiring as a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent.

Freitas responded to the Pentagon crash site, helping dig through the debris in the wake of the terrorist attack.

"Everything in the pile was a mismatch of melted office telephones, luggage and shredded clothes, and people's certificates of achievement," said Freitas. "I hope that the things that I found in the pile brought peace to someone. Maybe a family member or somebody who worked in that building. Their family may have something to remember them by. It's why I do what I do. It's why I've been in law enforcement almost my whole life is to help."

"I'm proud to say that these heroes are a part of Team HCSO. We are honored to have them," said Sheriff Chad Chronister. "We recognize the job that was done on 9/11; we appreciate those that were on the frontline; and we remember the lives we lost."