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Current as of June 25, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.

COVID-19 Testing Sites - 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 now giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program


Access the Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard


Graphs, Charts, and Real Time Tracking of COVID-19


Data Sources


Data Sources on Social Media


Other Resources




GOP governors have faced enormous media pressure to lock down their states in solidarity with Democrats, and some now are getting browbeaten to shut down again amid coronavirus flare-ups. So it’s worth pointing out that states that didn’t lock down this spring kept the virus under control and experienced fewer deaths than most that did.

A new analysis by The Sentinel, a Kansas nonprofit, compares the 42 states that shut down most of their economies with the eight that did not. The latter group includes mostly rural states with some small metropolitan areas: North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Utah. Private employment on average fell by 7.8% between May 2019 and May 2020 in these states while plunging 13.2% in the others. 

Rural state economies generally rely more on “essential” services like agriculture and food production, and some industries like energy and hospitality would have shed jobs regardless of the lockdowns. Still, private job losses were higher in states that locked down like Colorado (9.5%) compared to economically similar ones that didn’t like Utah (4.6%).

Yet per-capita Covid fatalities in states that stayed open were on average about 75% lower than those that locked down. One reason is that deaths in most states, regardless of whether they locked down, have been concentrated in nursing home facilities and minority communities that have higher rates of underlying health conditions and multigenerational housing.

This is a main reason hospitalizations and deaths continued to surge in states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Massachusetts long after lockdowns took effect. About half of deaths in New Jersey and Illinois have been in nursing homes, and most others have been in dense low-income minority neighborhoods where social distancing is difficult.

Deploying more tests and protective equipment can help shield these vulnerable communities, and citizens can do their part by donning face masks in public indoor locations like supermarkets. But governors don’t need to intubate their economies to save lives.


Scientists working to quell the COVID-19 pandemic have developed tests that detect antibodies in the blood of people who have previously been infected with the new coronavirus. These serology tests can provide important data on how COVID-19 is spreading through a population. There is also hope that the presence of certain antibodies may signify immunity to future infection—a possibility scientists are still investigating. Antibody tests do have potential shortcomings: they may detect ineffective antibodies, they do not indicate if an infection is still active, and they fail to detect infection if administered before antibodies develop. A new test's accuracy can also be difficult to determine because of a lack of data.

Still, such tests have been proposed as a way for individuals to find out if they have already been infected with the novel coronavirus. But a mathematical wrinkle makes these tests—and in fact, all screening tests—hard to interpret: even with a very accurate test, the fewer people in a population who have a condition, the more likely it is that an individual's positive result is wrong. If it is, people might think they have the antibodies (and thus may have immunity), when in fact they do not.

A positive screening test result for other diseases usually prompts follow-up testing to confirm a diagnosis. But for COVID-19 screening, such follow-up has been rare because testing resources are scarce or because other testing methods are prioritized for the sickest patients. Here's a look at the massive impact infection rates can have on the predictive value of these tests for individuals.


WASHINGTON—Many Americans receiving tax refunds this spring and summer, including some who haven’t even filed their tax returns yet, will receive interest payments from the Internal Revenue Service for late refunds.

Any individual income tax refunds issued after April 15 will be paid with interest, even though the tax-filing deadline has been extended to July 15. That IRS decision, announced Wednesday, stems from a quirk in the tax code and in the way the filing deadline was extended.

The result: Many people who chose to delay filing their tax returns will get a bonus from the government. The IRS, meanwhile, will be paying for the privilege of holding on to the money since April 15—even to taxpayers who haven’t claimed it yet.

The tax agency didn’t immediately have estimates Wednesday on how many people would be affected or how much money it expected to pay. The IRS issued about 11 million refunds between mid-April and mid-June and continues to process returns.

The IRS charges interest when taxpayers don’t pay on time and it pays interest to taxpayers when the government issues refunds too slowly. When refunds are delayed, the IRS pays interest rates far higher than bank accounts do: 5% compounded daily for the second quarter and 3% compounded daily starting July 1.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the IRS extended the typical April 15 deadline to July 15. Officials encouraged taxpayers to file quickly and claim their refunds, but millions are still waiting until closer to the deadline.

Those who followed the advice to file promptly could lose out on potential interest payments while those who waited would benefit. Other taxpayers have been waiting for months for their refunds while the agency’s buildings were closed. They could benefit from interest payments under the IRS decision.

In a typical year, the tax code requires the IRS to start paying interest if a refund is held up for more than 45 days beyond the original tax-filing deadline. Normally, that means refunds issued after the end of May come with interest.

The tax-code section governing interest payments says the 45-day period is determined from the due date without regard to extensions. This year, however, that 45-day rule isn’t in effect and interest started accruing after April 15.

The IRS said the interest payments may arrive separately from tax refunds.

The IRS approach seems fair, and it makes sure to provide interest payments to people who filed early and are still waiting for refunds, said Keith Fogg, who directs the Harvard Law School program that offers tax assistance to low-income households.

“The IRS seems to have chosen a method that is very taxpayer friendly and will not subject it to criticism,” he said. “Hard to fault it for that.”

There is one catch: The interest payments from the IRS will count as taxable income for 2020.


After months of sheltering in place, Americans are finally returning to their favorite restaurants, stores, and barbershops. As of June 1, all 50 states have started to reopen.

We may not know what life after the coronavirus looks like, but one thing is certain. As life returns to normal, millions of Americans will rely on natural gas to refuel their cars and reopen their businesses.

Fortunately, America's energy sector was well prepared to survive the coronavirus outbreak. Having weathered the storm, natural gas producers will help get the economy humming in a way that benefits American consumers and the environment alike.

COVID-19 certainly caused problems for America's energy sector. But even despite these recent setbacks, natural gas has proven quite resilient. U.S. natural gas prices have remained relatively steady over the past few months. And the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects average natural gas consumption to fall by less than 4 percent this year.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. America's shale energy boom helped make natural gas the leading source of electricity nationwide. More than 38 percent of the nation's power came from natural gas in 2019. With demand expected to rebound as early as next year, it seems like natural gas will remain the nation's go-to energy source for the foreseeable future.

That's great news for Americans. Ever since the United States became the world's leading producer of natural gas, households across the country have seen their energy costs plummet. Americans will continue to benefit as the country grows more reliant on natural gas. Low gas prices will add $2,700 to the average household's disposable income this year, according to an analysis from the research firm IHS. That number is expected to rise to $3,500 per household by 2025.


Are you banking on Social Security to care for you in your senior years? Here's the cold, hard truth: While Social Security does promise retirement income, it very likely won't be enough to support the lifestyle you want. The program simply wasn't designed that way. Social Security is, and always has been, a supplementary source of income that usually covers 30% to 50% of your lifestyle needs.

Despite this knowledge, too many Americans end up mostly dependent on their Social Security benefits. The culprit is a lack of savings. And that's understandable on some level – it takes decades of disciplined saving and investing to amass a seven-figure nest egg, which is the minimum experts say you need to live comfortably after leaving the workforce.


Mekhi James, just 3 years old, is beyond the reach of your virtue signaling and your politics now.

That little boy slipped into Chicago's never-ending river of violence as have thousands before him, a river that numbs the city even as it washes the names of the dead from common memory.

The toddler was killed in Chicago's street gang wars, one of more than 100 people shot over the weekend in the city, with 12 of those shot younger than 18. Included among the dead were two boys coming home after getting candy at a neighborhood store, a 13-year-old girl and Mekhi James.

The spike in violence in Chicago and other Democratic Party-controlled big cities, from New York to Los Angeles, is a function of street gangs, drug wars and politics. The elected social justice warriors demand little or no bail for the violent who are released back onto the streets. Broken public school systems serve power interests, not the poor. Tax policy kills business and job opportunities in troubled neighborhoods.

In urban America, Democrats have no competition. And all that matters to the political class is counting the votes.

Carried away in that river of violence, Mekhi James slips past your public anguish and your hand-wringing about why "something" isn't done.

He's indifferent to your "hate has no home here" signs now. He's immune to your good intentions and tweets about that Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

The river takes him beyond your self-indulgent sentimentality that mourns the baby's death but allows for the continuation of policy that wreaks havoc upon the poor, election year after election year.

"A line was crossed," said a broken-hearted Rev. Ira Acree of Greater St. John Bible Church on the West Side to a gathering of angry and distressed mourners from the neighborhood. "This 3-year-old baby lost his life. ... We say Black lives matter, but we're here to say Black baby lives matter more."

Of course they should matter. But do they really matter?


After the shootings in the past few days near the Capitol Hill anti-police protest zone, the call went out, paradoxically, for the help of the one thing the protest is most arguing against.

“Our movement should demand and insist that the Seattle Police fully investigate this attack and be held accountable to bring the killer(s) to justice,” said Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant in a statement. One paragraph later she re-upped her demand, however, to “defund” these same police.

It wasn’t just Sawant with the suddenly mixed message. City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda noted in a Monday meeting that “we want to make sure that firefighters and EMT have access to do their jobs and help those that need it.”

That seems noncontroversial — except how do we think ambulances get access to often volatile crime scenes? Who typically does that work of securing shooting scenes, so that aid workers can move in?

Even the protesters, who in a statement said they took two shooting victims to the hospital because Seattle police and fire were too slow in getting there, seemed to tacitly acknowledge the limits of a “no-cop” zone.

“We as safety teams are peacekeepers, not police,” read the unsigned statement from the CHOP, or Capitol Hill Organized Protest. “We do not want to be homicide detectives, or CSI, or accessories to this murder.”


Former football player Herschel Walker speaks with Bill O'Reilly on "The First" about why he supports police. 

"99.9% of the police are good people, I support them, they're defending this country," he said.


From “U.S. Grant and the Colored People,” an 1872 campaign pamphlet by Frederick Douglass. Last Friday a mob tore down a statue of President Grant in San Francisco:

There are many dissemblers and falsifiers of the Greeley party in the South who are seeking the control of the colored voters, by declaring to them that President Grant is not, and never has been, a faithful and sincere friend of my race. . . . President Grant’s course, from the time he drew the sword in defense of the old Union in the Valley of the Mississippi till he sheathed it at Appomattox, and thence to this day in his reconstruction policy and his war upon the Ku-Klux, is without a deed or word to justify such an accusation. . . .

I have often been called upon to reconcile my exalted opinion of President Grant with the fact that I failed to be invited with the Commissioners of Inquiry to Santo Domingo to dine with the President at the White House. I have two answers to those who inquire of me on this point. First. The failure of the President to invite me could not have been because my personal presence on account of color would have been disagreeable to him, for he never withheld any social courtesy to General Tate, the Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Hayti, a man of my own complexion. . . . It is, besides, impossible that color is the explanation of the omission to invite me, because the gentlemen whom he did invite had dined with me daily during ten weeks on an American ship, under an American flag, and in presence of representatives of the leading presses of the United States, and this doubtless by the President’s special direction. It is further obvious that color had nothing to do with the omission, because other gentlemen accompanying the expedition to Santo Domingo equally with myself, though white, failed to receive an invitation to dine at the White House. . . . My second answer is that my devotion to General Grant rests upon high and broad public grounds, and not upon personal favor. I see in him the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race from all the malign, reactionary, social, and political elements that would whelm them in destruction. He is the rock-bound coast against the angry and gnawing waves of a storm-tossed ocean saying, thus far only shalt thou come.

Wherever else there may be room for doubt and uncertainty, there is nothing of the kind with Ulysses S. Grant as our candidate. In the midst of political changes he is now as ever—unswerving and inflexible. Nominated regularly by the time honored Republican party, he is clothed with all the sublime triumphs of humanity which make its record. That party stands to-day free from alloy, pure and simple. There is neither ambiguity in its platform nor incongruity in its candidates. U.S. Grant and Henry Wilson . . .—the soldier and the Senator—are men in whom we can confide. No two names can better embody the precious and priceless results of the suppression of rebellion and the abolition of slavery. We can no more array ourselves against these candidates and this party than we can resume our chains or insult our mothers.


Imagine how much longer and bloodier World War II might have been had Admiral Yamamoto not filled the decks of his vulnerable carriers at Midway with fully fueled airplanes awaiting ordnance. What if Hitler, despite his anger at the bombing of Berlin, hadn’t switched tactics from downing Spitfires to uselessly attacking London?

Battlefield blunders can be as decisive as brilliant tactics, whether they suddenly advance tribal factions toward nationhood, punish a proud military unaccustomed to losing or temporarily swing the balance of power in an utterly unexpected direction.

That said, following are five losers who might have wished for a do-over.

 


Understanding how planets form is one of the main challenges scientists face when placing our own and other planetary systems in context. Planets are thought to form from the disk-shaped clouds of gas and dust that surround newborn stars, but this process has never been observed. Astronomers normally only observe planets after they have already formed and have to deduce the pathways that led to their final states. 

For more than a decade, astronomers have searched for planets orbiting AU Microscopii, a nearby star still surrounded by a disk of debris left over from its formation. Now scientists using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, and now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope report the discovery of a planet about as large as Neptune that circles the young star in just over a week. 

The new planet, AU Mic b, is located 31.9 light-years away in the southern constellation Microscopium and described in a paper published in Nature. The system, known as AU Mic for short, provides a one-of-a-kind laboratory for studying how planets and their atmospheres form, evolve, and interact with their stars.

“AU Mic is a young, nearby M dwarf star. It’s surrounded by a vast debris disk in which moving clumps of dust have been tracked, and now, thanks to TESS and Spitzer, it has a planet with a direct size measurement,” said co-author Bryson Cale, a doctoral student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “There is no other known system that checks all of these important boxes.”


Europa, with an ocean hidden beneath a thick shell of ice, long has been viewed as a potential habitat for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, alongside other candidates such as Mars and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A new study presented on Wednesday at a geoscience conference underscores its potential.

Europa’s ocean may have formed after water-rich minerals ejected their water thanks to heating caused by the decay of radioactive elements in its interior early in its history, the researchers found.

The effect of tides caused by Europa’s gravitational interactions with Jupiter - the solar system’s largest planet - and two other large Jovian moons, Io and Ganymede, also may have played a role.

“We think Europa’s ocean may have been habitable early when it formed because our models show that the ocean’s composition may have been only mildly acidic, containing carbon dioxide and some sulfate salts,” said planetary scientist Mohit Melwani Daswani of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the study’s leader.

“The availability of liquid water is the first step to habitability. In addition, chemical exchange between the ocean and the rocky interior may have been significant in the past so potential life may have been able to use chemical energy to survive.”

Daswani said microbes akin to certain Earth bacteria that use carbon dioxide for energy could have survived using ingredients available in Europa’s early ocean.

Europa is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon. Europa’s ocean, perhaps 40 to 100 miles (65 to 160 km) deep, may contain double the water of Earth’s oceans.


To the boys, it was just a sugary treat. To their parents, prominent medical researchers, what happened in their Moscow apartment that day in 1959 was a vital experiment with countless lives at stake — and their own children as guinea pigs.

“We formed a kind of line,” Dr. Peter Chumakov, who was 7 at the time, recalled in an interview. Into each waiting mouth, a parent popped a sugar cube laced with weakened poliovirus — an early vaccine against a dreaded disease. “I was eating it from the hands of my mother.”

Today, that same vaccine is gaining renewed attention from researchers — including those brothers, who all grew up to be virologists — as a possible weapon against the new coronavirus, based in part on research done by their mother, Dr. Marina Voroshilova.

Dr. Voroshilova established that the live polio vaccine had an unexpected benefit that, it turns out, could be relevant to the current pandemic: People who got the vaccine did not become sick with other viral illnesses for a month or so afterward. She took to giving the boys polio vaccine each fall, as protection against flu.