Note: Please do not reply to this email as replies will not be reviewed. If you have a question or comment, click here.
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Current as of August 11, 2020, at 8:00 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.
The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity is giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program: View DEO Dashboard Here.
Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19
Data Sources
Data Sources on Social Media
Other Resources
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Current Statistics
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Fatality rate in Florida - 1.6%
- 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 - .05%
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35-44 years old - .20%
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45-54 years old - .42%
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55-64 years old - 1.2%
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65-74 years old - 4.3%
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75 and up - 14.3%
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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 - 40 years old
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Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 36% decrease
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ICU beds available in Florida - 21%
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Hospital beds available in Florida - 26%
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Vaccine Tracking
Last updated: August 7, 2020 8:28 AM PST
202
vaccines are in development.
24
are now in clinical testing.
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It appears that government-imposed restrictions on travel, business, and social contact don't become more palatable with age. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer, the one competency that officials have consistently displayed is in tightening the screws, using the licenses and permissions they require as enforcement tools. For people tired of being bossed around, the obvious response is to carry on without the government's imprimatur—and they're doing so in droves. It's an attitude likely to live on long after the crisis has passed.
"Our businesses are doomed," Chris Polone, co-owner of a Fort Worth bar that was one of more than 800 such establishments to open in defiance of Texas closure orders, said at the end of July. "We have nothing to lose. We can either fight this thing, Or we can starve ourselves out."
As apocalyptic as that sounds, it's a reasonable statement when the review site Yelp reports that 55 percent of all businesses shut during the pandemic are believed to have closed their doors forever. For many entrepreneurs, breaking the rules may be the only way to survive.
That the rebellion among Texas taverns is alive and well is obvious from a desperate-sounding open letter issued last week by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC). "Recently we have spoken with business owners who tell us they don't intend to follow the orders," wrote A. Bentley Nettles, the commission's executive director. "When a business tells TABC it doesn't intend to follow these orders, you leave the agency with no option but to revoke your license and shut you down."
The letter contains much huffing and puffing about how it's a "privilege" to be in the booze business, subject to following politicians' dictates. But that's what government officials always say when they impose licensing requirements on people trying to make a living. Then, feeding yourself and keeping a roof over your head becomes subject to jumping through hoops, paying fees, and keeping the right people happy.
With one out of four U.S. jobs now requiring an occupational license—not to mention the business licenses, liquor licenses, and other forms of official permission that businesses must pursue—legally making a buck can be a precarious activity even in good times. It gets that much worse when a crisis drives politicians into frenzies of panic and power-lust, with the authority to grant and revoke permissions a tool for imposing their will.
"We have gotten 25,000 complaints to the State of businesses that are in violation of the reopening plan—25,000 complaints," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo snarled in June. "A bar or restaurant that is violating these rules can lose their liquor license. State Liquor Authority inspectors are out. We have a task force of State investigators who are out. You can lose your liquor license and that is a big deal for a bar or restaurant."
Among the jurisdictions that have threatened or actually revoked licenses for businesses violating lockdown orders are New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Clark County, Nevada, to name just a small sample. The affected businesses include barbers, car washes, furniture stores, gyms, and smoke shops—all requiring government permission to legally operate.
But operating legally isn't the only way to do business.
"Good luck," Bob Martin, a 79-year-old barber in Snohomish, Washington, told officials when they said they were going to charge him $90,000 in fines for trimming hair after his license was pulled and in defiance of state closure orders.
Gym owners in Bellmawr, New Jersey, broke into their own establishment and resumed serving customers after authorities forcibly closed the place. "The defiant owners of Atilis Gym kicked in plywood panels that had sealed the entrance to their Browning Road business since Monday, drawing cheers from a group of flag-waving supporters," reported the Courier-Post.
And, of course, there are those 800-plus bars in Texas, serving customers despite orders to the contrary.
Officials in Los Angeles have run into so much push-back that now they're threatening to cut water and power to businesses and homes that don't comply with lockdown orders. Depriving people of electricity and running water seems an unlikely means for improving public health, but officialdom is always more interested in compelling submission than in achieving reasonable outcomes.
But submission is harder to come by when the stakes are so high. The government is actually ordering people to refrain from earning their keep, and instead to humbly submit to bankruptcy and beggary. To some, submitting to the rules can look foolish and suicidal—like baring your throat to a predator.
And once you've battled government officials threatening your ability to make a living during hard times, why would you assume, after the crisis passes, that they've suddenly become wiser and better disposed to your wellbeing? People who have questioned officials' judgment and defied their orders are unlikely to lose that habit after the pandemic passes. Sure, they'll probably continue to apply for licenses to operate just to make life easy. But they'll remember that officials tried to strip them of the "privilege" of putting food on the table and they'll realize just how dangerous it is to rely on such permission.
It's too much to hope that the licensing and permitting apparatus that politicians have carefully constructed over the years will soon be swept away by a righteous wave of public revulsion. Big changes are hard and the permission state that we live in will, almost certainly, still formally exist in the years to come. But people aren't going to be so eager to ask permission, and they'll be much more willing to live their lives in its absence.
Imagine state governments announcing they plan to shut down schools until there is a cure for breast cancer. That is essentially the logic they are employing to shut schools because of a virus that does not affect children in any statistical or clinical way.
It has already been proven that children have a much higher risk of dying in a lightning strike or a car accident than from COVID-19. Also, almost all children who get the virus are either asymptomatic or are less sick then they are from the flu, and we never close school for the flu and cold season. The only defense left for the side that wants to continue the child abuse and close schools is that somehow opening schools will help them transmit the virus and kill Granny. Not so, according to a new study of 100 schools in the U.K., the largest one conducted to date.
The Public Health England research is slated to be published later this year, but researchers have already confirmed from monitoring 20,000 students and teachers in around 100 schools across England during the partially reopened summer term that there is very little evidence of school spread. The study will find there is "very little evidence that the virus is transmitted in schools," according to Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and a member of the government emergency advisory group Sage.
"This is the some of the largest data you will find on schools anywhere," added Professor Viner. "Britain has done very well in terms of thinking of collecting data in schools."
Viner also told the media over the weekend that a separate review by the group of 35 studies across the globe will show schools play only a "minor role" in spreading the virus. That review is due out next month, after most schools typically start for the fall semester.
"It is absolutely essential for schools to reopen in September. The risks to children from Covid are very low and the risks of school closures we know are very serious," he said. "Britain as a nation should stand up and say: our children are essential. Reopening schools is essential."
A recent contact tracing analysis published by the Swiss office of public health showed that schools accounted for just 0.3% of the community transmission. Of course, the largest share came … from home! This is why a recent analysis in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases found, "School closure carried out in Japan did not show any mitigating effect on the transmission of novel coronavirus infection."
It's not that children can't get the virus, it's just that there is no evidence that they are major vectors of transmission to others, nor is there evidence they contract the virus more from attending school than from being home with their parents.
As a Johns Hopkins analysis of mass quarantine in 2006, which was co-authored by famed smallpox eradicator D.A. Henderson, noted, "When schools closed for a winter holiday during the 1918 pandemic in Chicago, 'more influenza cases developed among pupils . . . than when schools were in session.'"
And remember, with pandemic flus, unlike with SARS-CoV-2, children are often the primary vector of transmission. Yet, still, as Henderson observed in another paper on the 1957 Asian flu, "the Nassau County Health Commissioner in New York stated that 'public schools should stay open even in an epidemic' and that 'children would get sick just as easily out of school.'"
How much more so when it comes to this epidemic, where children have already proven to be very rare vectors of the virus to begin with. One has to assume that children who do wind up contracting COVID-19 most likely got it from adults, not the other way around. Studies from countries including the U.K., Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, France, Ireland, Taiwan, and Iceland have all failed to find child-to-adult transmission.
Sweden is the biggest test of the effectiveness of school closures, because unlike in most countries, Sweden never closed its primary schools from the beginning of the epidemic. Nonetheless, the Public Health Agency of Sweden found no measurable difference of outcomes in children between Sweden and Finland, even though Finland closed its schools. "Closure or not of schools had no measurable direct impact on the number of laboratory confirmed cases in school-aged children in Finland or Sweden," concluded the report.
The head of Norway's Institute of Public Health, rather than taking a swipe at her neighboring country for leaving schools opened, actually believes the neighbor country did it right and that Norway should never have shut down even the high schools.
There is no reason their absence of older teachers, pending the end of this epidemic, should impede the opening of schools. Likewise, given that almost all of the few children who did die from COVID-19 had serious underlying conditions, there is no reason why those children can't be accommodated without shutting down the entire education of a generation of children.
Finally, let's not forget that teen suicide is the second-leading cause of death of that age group. Has anyone studied the effects of social isolation on teens' mental health compared to their extraordinary low risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19? A University of Wisconsin research survey found "significant mental health, anxiety, and depression issues in the high school-aged population" within the state, with 65% reporting anxiety symptoms. It's hard to imagine more children won't die from the lockdown than from the virus.
Nobody in politics is interested in answering these questions. One thing is clear, though. There is not a shred of health or science involved in the decisions to close schools. It's all about politics.
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As of 10:00 a.m. Eastern time, Aug. 10, 2020 (we’ll update every weekday morning). “The leading economic indicator is … the virus.” More than one analyst has put it to us this way. As we try to understand and quantify this unprecedented global economic collapse — and now the attempted restart — we’re following key metrics for COVID-19 and the broader economy. Welcome to Marketplace’s daily, at-a-glance update.
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U.S. COVID-19 deaths reported yesterday: 616 (falling)
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U.S. COVID-19 new cases yesterday: 51,291 (falling)
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Daily new tests reported, U.S.: 711,984 (rising)
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COVID patients now in hospital: 49,039 (falling)
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Days before student loan relief ends: 51
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Federal budget deficit, last 10 months: $2.8 trillion
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Job openings–June: 5.9 million
Keep in mind: The tally of COVID-19 cases represents only the ones that are documented.
To prove a study isn’t suffering from selection bias, one of the best methods is to find cases or studies with similar precepts that show different results. When conclusions and expertise are constantly challenged by counter-conclusions and counter-expertise, the better the investigative process becomes, and everyone benefits with a better-refined outcome. In studying different results of similar assumptions, we have a better chance of isolating and understanding causal variables.
After five months of a total collapse of social life under forced quarantines, if we are indeed facing a second wave with no vaccines yet, it’s time to declare that Sweden’s approach was correct all along. While the majority of political leaders around the globe panicked, lost their nerve, and — at least temporarily — wrecked our countries, that wasn’t the case everywhere.
In refusing to lock down citizens over coronavirus, Sweden appears to have both managed to avoid an economic crash as well as a devastating death toll. As Americans and most of the rest of the world ponder how to handle second or even third waves of the coronavirus and the prospect of further lockdown, Sweden is now likely on her way to immunity.
As the pandemic struck, the Swedes normalized as much as they could, while maintaining a measure of social distancing. What Sweden didn’t do, unlike most of the globe, is reflexively dive into a full-lockdown scenario. Instead, they allowed life to go continue as ordinarily as possible. Stores remained open. Restaurants remained open. Most importantly, schools remained open as well. The state banned public gatherings of more than 50 people, but any further social distancing measures were largely unenforced and voluntary.
From the start, the Swedish government repeatedly made it crystal clear to the public that the battle against COVID-19-19 would be a marathon, not a sprint, and that many people would die. With all that starkly presented, the decision was made that (mostly) normal life was favorable to the alternatives, and herd immunity and economic stability would be the result.
By every measurable index, Sweden came out of the worst of the initial wave of the pandemic relatively unscathed. Sweden’s economy shrank 8.6 percent, compared to the European Union average of 11.9 percent. Countries with severe lockdowns like Spain, France, and Italy experienced even higher economic contractions, at 18.5 percent, 13.8 percent, and 12.4 percent, respectively. In short, by not completely cowering in fear and taking a few basic and prudent hygiene and social distancing measures, Sweden saved its economy and protected citizens from other evils of lockdowns.
In number of deaths, Sweden and Italy provide two completely different case studies. Italy chose some of the most severe lockdowns outside China. But, as Bloomberg reported, “on a per-capita basis, Italy’s death toll of more than 35,154 comes to about 600 per 1 million people, as does Sweden’s 5,743.” In other words, according to this comparison, the lockdown did not affect the death toll one bit.
Sadly, the harsh reality is that the folks most likely to pass away from the disease — namely, the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions — were largely the ones who ended up dying from COVID-19, lockdown or not. As of August, Sweden’s death toll per 100,000 residents was around 56, lower than the United Kingdom’s total of 69, and far lower than Belgium’s figure of 86.
But the most important, albeit controversial, factor is not Sweden’s economy or death toll. For months, the U.S. and U.K. response to COVID-19 was to lock everything down and hope for a vaccine. While vaccine work is ongoing, the threat of further spikes and waves of the virus suggests that the lockdown strategy is doomed. Many countries are on the verge of bankruptcy. More people are dying from natural conditions and diseases like cancer and tuberculosis. Children are falling further and further behind in their education.
In short, there’s no easy way out now, and sooner or later, herd immunity will be the only way out. Thanks to the measures it took from the start, Sweden, according to a new study, appears to be on its way to achieving the elusive immunity every other country is craving right now. The analysis suggests that roughly twice as many people in Sweden have COVID-19 immunity, compared to their counterparts in countries that locked down. The source of this potentially life-saving immunity is T-cells, which helped develop antibodies in healthy people who had no infection but were exposed to infectious individuals.
The implication of the information contained in the recent study means that, without wrecking its economy, Sweden ended up with around the same level of dead proportional to overall population as other countries that did engage in massive lockdowns, and will be more ready than most of the world to face future waves of the virus. As a recent academic essay suggests:
Confidence in its Public Health Agency remains high at 65 percent, suggesting Swedes are not unhappy with the tradeoffs made. And they are prepared to follow directions, perhaps more than Australians and residents of the United States and the much-touted Germany. Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency says 87 percent of the population is complying with the social distancing restrictions that are in place, up from 82 percent a month ago.
There are similar dynamics observable across countries. One, from masks to lockdowns, “the experts” failed horribly. Two, the lockdowns and travel bans remain a continuous mistake. At the same point in the cycle, New York’s daily death toll equals those of Florida, California, and Texas combined. Needless to mention, Florida achieved that largely without lockdowns, and managed to avoid mismanagement, rioting, and joblessness. Yet New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is worshipped in the media.
Finally, and most importantly, the continuous lockdown and travel and flight bans show something else: our elected representatives lack the fortitude to go against massive public pressure and media propaganda. Quite simply, they have largely abdicated their duty and failed to lead with strength just when we all needed them the most. In doing so, they wrecked booming economies — the United Kingdom and the United States are just two examples of this awful phenomenon.
The thought that things could be a whole lot better if we’d only followed a similar path as Sweden did should be quite dispiriting, whatever your political position might be.
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Russia registered the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine, President Vladimir Putin said, marking a milestone in the fight against the novel coronavirus but amid rising safety concerns in the West over the country’s accelerated clinical evaluations.
Russian officials have compared Tuesday’s registration of the vaccine with the health ministry to the Cold War-era space race, and Moscow hopes the landmark event will return some prestige to the scientific legacy inherited from the Soviet Union.
The conditions of the vaccine’s development, however, have raised concerns in Moscow and in the West over the safety of the vaccine and fears that the Kremlin is sacrificing the safety of its citizens.
Scientists at the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute have employed military testing, accelerated clinical evaluations and shortened test-trial times in an attempt to be first with a vaccine. Russia hopes to use it in a massive immunization rollout at home and export it abroad.
“We should be grateful to those who have taken this first step, which is very important for our country and the whole world,” Mr. Putin told a government meeting, a Kremlin transcript showed.
“I hope we can start a massive release of this vaccine soon,” he said, adding that one of his daughters had taken the vaccine.
Unherd — a British website featuring independent thinkers on the left and right – has a good interview with Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist who has led the pandemic response in Sweden. Sweden is one of the few western democracies that did not impose a strict de jure lockdown to deal with COVID-19, though as Tegnell notes, the government did encourage, and get, a lot of voluntary social distancing from the Swedish people.
I supported a temporary lockdown during the late March–early April timeframe here in the United States, but otherwise I think Tegnell’s basic approach to the disease is the correct one, and I’m concerned that governors across the country may be abandoning it in light of the recent surge in infections in some regions.
The great difficulty with pandemics is getting a firm grip on the characteristics of the disease. Unfortunately, medical experts cannot simply study a virus and draw good conclusions about its severity, its preferred vectors of transmission, or the demographics that may be either particularly susceptible or relatively immune to its effects. That information can only be gained by observing how the virus actually works in a population, and the fog of pandemic war makes drawing firm conclusions very difficult.
Even after living with COVID-19 for half a year, there are only four things I believe we can say with high confidence about the disease: It’s highly contagious, it’s much less severe than we originally feared, only the very elderly are at serious risk, and those who have been infected and have recovered acquire an immunity that removes them from the pool of targets for the disease.
In dealing with a pandemic, the right goal is to reduce the total human harm over the life of the pandemic. That includes serious illness and death inflicted by the disease itself, but also harm from other illnesses that would have been treated but for restrictions imposed by the pandemic, as well as the secondary but very real human deprivations that occur when the normal patterns of life are disrupted.
The ripple effects of an epidemic are alienation, abuse, poverty, and mental illness. Those effects tend to cascade over time, and they have the potential to be greater than the immediate health consequences of the disease.
That is the reason there is such value in getting through the epidemic as quickly as possible. It’s the only way to minimize both the immediate and secondary damage. In the absence of a safe and effective vaccine, the disease has to spread enough, and create enough natural immunity across all the regions of the country, that infection becomes uncommon, deaths are reduced, and people feel free to work, learn, travel, and socialize on normal terms.
Epidemics obey Farr’s curve. Once a contagious virus has seeded sufficiently in an area — and that had happened in parts of the United States by at least January and probably before — then in the absence of artificial controls infections will spike rapidly and then just as rapidly subside as those who are most likely to get and spread the disease are removed from the target population.
We can not repeal Farr’s curve, and it is not desirable to flatten it beyond what is necessary to protect the vulnerable demographics and preserve hospital capacity.
That means we should quarantine the sick, take every possible step to keep the virus away from where senior citizens live or congregate, and manage our ICU capacity to prepare for surges in need. We should continue the search for and use of therapeutics to reduce further the severity of the disease. We should strongly encourage protocols, such as hand washing, and yes, wearing masks, which hold some promise for moderating the epidemic without actually prohibiting social interaction.
Other than that, we should keep society as open as possible, relying mostly on the good sense of the people to flatten sufficiently the upside of the epidemic curve.
As an economics professor of mine was fond of saying, “The crew of the Titanic stopped doing dishes when the ship hit the iceberg.” Populations change their behavior when an emergency like a pandemic hits. They learn to balance the danger presented by the disease in light of their individual and family circumstances. Not everyone makes the best judgments of course, but over time people and organizations learn how to reduce risk and slow the spread of the disease while continuing to go about some semblance of normal life.
As that adjustment occurs, government lockdowns become less necessary to flatten the curve. Since lockdowns cause cascading damage the longer they are in place, and especially if they are re-imposed after having been lifted, the balance of harm therefore weighs more and more against them over time.
Four months ago, I predicted the “rolling series of epidemics” we are now witnessing around the country. It is concerning to see infections going up in different regions, but as long as fatalities remain low, and hospitals have sufficient capacity to care for the sick, the fact that the disease is progressing through the less vulnerable parts of the population is a sign of progress, not failure. It means that more areas are moving closer to the end of the pandemic.
The only other possible policy is what Tegnell calls “eradication,” which means isolating the country, and locking down people within it, to the extent necessary to snuff out incidence of the disease. As Tegler notes, that has been the approach in New Zealand. So far it’s worked there, and more power to the Kiwis. But they are going to have to remain very isolated until a vaccine is developed, and the economic devastation from that is already great and will continue to grow.
More to the point, New Zealand has a small, homogeneous, and compliant population. It’s also an island country that can easily regulate or prevent entry. The United States is none of those things, and it’s simply not feasible to believe that the American people as a whole will be willing to submit to the kind of restrictions for the length of time that would be necessary to eradicate the disease here, even if we were willing to accept the secondary harm that would cause.
We have tools at our disposal to deal with COVID-19 that we did not have five months ago: better therapies, more stockpiled capacity, a population that is more aware of how to balance risk, and the knowledge that most people are not at serious risk should they become infected. All of that has increased our margin of safety. We should push that margin to the limit if necessary. The faster we can afford to allow the curve to go up, the quicker it will go down, and the less harm of all kinds it will cause over the life of the pandemic.
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The Seattle City Council Monday night approved cuts to partially defund the police department over objections of the mayor, police chief and Seattle Police Officers' Guild.
The council passed the cuts in a 7-1 vote, with the lone dissenter, Councilmember Kshama Sawant, saying the cuts didn't go far enough, MyNorthwest.com reported. Councilmember Debora Juarez was not present at the meeting and abstained.
The plan does not cut the department's funding by the 50% originally planned, and will only initially see 100 of the department's 1,400 officers reduced, Fox News reported.
But the plan is to continue the cuts in the 2021 budget to get closer to the goal, the council said.
"Instead of buying bullets, violence and intimidation, we are choosing — the city council is choosing — to invest in peace and restoration in a community that has been ravaged by generations of racism," Council President Lorena Gonzales said.
The city is under a 2012 federal consent decree for excessive use of police force, but move comes amid nationwide calls for police departments to be defunded and the monies moved to other forms of community outreach in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May.
Besides the mayor, police chief and police union, several pro-police groups in the city also urged the council not to take the action. Many cities where calls to defund police have been made have seen recent spikes in violence, including Portland, Oregon, Chicago and New York City.
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