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Current as of August 13, 2020, at 7:45 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 - 1.6%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .06%
  • 35-44 years old - .20%
  • 45-54 years old - .43%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.3%
  • 65-74 years old - 4.4%
  • 75 and up - 14.6%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 42 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 36% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 18%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 23%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: August 11, 2020 8:54 AM PST

202
vaccines are in development.

24
are now in clinical testing.

A headline Monday afternoon in The New York Times' "Coronavirus Briefing" email newsletter snapped my head to attention, and not just because of the old-timey classic rock pun: "The kids are not all right."

Like tens of millions of parents in this country, I have school-aged offspring and a non-insignificant amount of anxiety over just how they will be spending their time (and mine) a month from now. If, as the Times asserted in the first sentence of its write-up, "new research [is] reflecting just how vulnerable children can be to the coronavirus," that could significantly alter my family's decision-making process. I need to use this news.

Then I started clicking on the links. And lo! There was this troubling Wall Street Journal headline: "Latest Research Points to Children Carrying, Transmitting Coronavirus." Given that the preliminary research as of three weeks ago suggested that elementary school-aged children, such as my 5-year-old, rarely contract, get sick from, or transmit COVID-19—so rarely, in fact, that a leading British epidemiologist was quoted in the Times of London as saying there hadn't yet been a single case of a teacher catching the virus from a student anywhere in the world—then such a development would count as a major reversal.

"The latest research," the Journal went on, "indicates children may be carriers just as much as adults." Huge, if true.

Yet the only research presented in the article supporting the notion that children contract the virus "just as much" as adults came from a single overnight summer camp in Georgia, at which kids (though not staff) didn't wear masks, and participated in singing and shouting exercises in unventilated rooms. That is not a useful representative sample.

A more helpful survey of the available literature comes not from the world of journalism, but from a website called COVID Explained, run by Brown University economist Emily Oster, Harvard Medical School professor Galit Alter, and others. Their gloss, as of August 3:

There are a few [random sample] studies….An early one was conducted in Iceland. Researchers there tested about 13,000 random people, including 848 kids. Among the whole population, 0.8% of people (so, almost 1 percent) tested positive for COVID-19. Among children under 10, though, there were no positive cases. This difference was very unlikely to occur by chance.

Data from a single town in Italy which did very wide-spread screening leads us to the same conclusion: kids are much less likely than older people to be infected.

Another study uses mathematical models to estimate that people under age 20 are half as susceptible to infection as adults over 20….

Altogether this evidence suggests that kids are less likely to be infected with coronavirus than adults.

The Oster/Alter tentative interpretations may well be wrong, and the amount of random sampling is still maddeningly small, but their thoroughness of study-picking and cautiousness of conclusion inspire more confidence than 99 percent of the elite media I consume on this topic. There is an irritating tendency to elevate scary-sounding anecdotes over data, to collapse the definition of "children" into a single glob rather than as cohorts with importantly different characteristics, and to treat the science and the politics of this issue as national when it is actually a geographically variant and locally administered story.

Journalistic outlets have been pinning their school-reopening pessimism this week on a new American Academy of Pediatrics report that says the number of cumulative COVID-19 cases among children—the definition of which varies by state, from between 0 and 14 (Florida) to between 0 and 24 (Alabama)—grew by 97,000 in the last two weeks of July, from 242,000 to 339,000. That is an increase of 40 percent over a short period of time.

Since mid-April, the share of coronavirus cases accounted for by children has marched steadily higher in each two-week reporting period, from 2 percent to the current level of 8.8 percent. What explains the steady increase? Many suspect the recent re-opening of day care facilities and summer camps (on which more below). It is also true that as testing has become more widespread, it has detected more asymptomatic carriers (who previously would not have been tested), which is one reason why the case fatality rate has continued to fall.

Children's share of coronavirus-related hospitalizations has remained disproportionately low, going from 0.8 percent in late May to 1.4 percent now. (The overall hospitalization rate of kids who test positive has been cut nearly in half, from 3.8 percent to 2 percent.) Happiest of all, just 86 people classified as "children" by the states have died, which means kids account for just 0.06 percent of all coronavirus deaths, and their case fatality rate is just 0.03 percent.

Before your eyes glaze over at all those single-digit percentages, remember this: Children are 23.1 percent of the United States population. That means that they account for 1 out of every 4.3 people, 1 out of every 11.4 coronavirus cases, 1 out of every 50 hospitalizations, and 1 out of every 3,333 deaths.

So it is flatly untrue that "children may be carriers just as much as adults." What's more, treating children as an undifferentiated mass is particularly unhelpful when making parental decisions and public policy, particularly as it relates to the pressing question of whether and how to reopen schools.

The Centers for Disease Control breaks out national coronavirus statistics by several different age cohorts, producing this startling number: Only 20 kids between the ages of 5 and 14 (from kindergarten through middle school) have died from coronavirus since February 1. This group was two and a half times more likely to die from the flu, and four times more likely to die from pneumonia. Among the more droplet-swapping demo of 15-to-18-year-olds, only 31 have died. An additional 25 kids under 5 years old have also perished.

All of which means children so far have not been measurably "vulnerable" (to use the New York Times adjective) to coronavirus. But what about their ability to transmit the potentially deadly disease even when asymptomatic?

Here's how The New Yorker treated this urgent scientific question: "Some studies have found that young children are not as likely as adults to spread COVID-19. But summer camps on Long Island and in Georgia, and schools internationally, have had virus outbreaks." That's one way of assessing things, I suppose.

The Wall Street Journal, whose headline suggests that the "latest research points to children…transmitting coronavirus," cites just one study outside of the Georgia sleepaway camp example: a big contract tracing effort in South Korea, which found (in the WSJ's wording) that "children between 10 and 19 years old transmitted the virus within their own households at the same rate as adults of certain ages," but also that "children under the age of 10 didn't spread the virus as much."

Here's how COVID Explained parses that same study's data (the site also examines two smaller surveys):
It appears that outside of household contacts, transmission from kids is really low (note that in South Korea they wear masks and are socially distancing, which contributes to the low non-household contact transmissions. Wearing a mask is really important!). Among young children, transmission even within a household is low: if your little kid has COVID-19, there seems to be only about a 5% chance you'll get it. Older kids do seem to transmit the virus to household contacts as efficiently as adults yet are still less likely to have the virus and less likely to transmit to non-household contacts.

Sorting through the available (and rapidly growing, if still woefully insufficient) underlying science is the critical precursor to having a rational discussion about school reopenings. (Which as of this writing is already off the table in 17 of the country's 20 largest school districts.)

But we also have two other very relevant, if not always referenced, datasets: school reopenings worldwide, and day care reopenings at home. What do they tell us?

The University of Washington's Department of Global Health five weeks ago surveyed 15 countries that have reopened schools, and concluded: "So far, countries that reopened schools after reducing infection levels—and imposed requirements like physical distancing and limits on class sizes—have not seen a surge in coronavirus cases….There have not yet been rigorous scientific studies on the potential for school-based spread, but a smattering of case reports, most of them not yet peer-reviewed, bolster the notion that it is not inevitably a high risk."

The report does highlight a case that comes up frequently in these conversations: Israel. "But there have been school-based outbreaks in countries with higher community infection levels and countries that apparently eased safety guidelines too soon," the study cautioned. "In Israel, the virus infected more than 200 students and staff after schools reopened in early May and lifted limits on class size a few weeks later."

The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has a more recent rundown of European Union (E.U.) school reopenings, concluding, among other things, that "If appropriate physical distancing and hygiene measures are applied, schools are unlikely to be more effective propagating environments than other occupational or leisure settings with similar densities of people."

Those in favor of reopening schools should not skim over the conditionality in both studies' conclusions. The "if"s are critical.

When it comes to day cares and summer camps, data are considerably harder to find, which increases journalistic reliance on negative anecdotes. "The media coverage," Emily Oster wrote on July 30, "can give one the impression that it is impossible to operate a child care setting without outbreaks. These data contradict this."

What data is that? Well, Oster and her team generated a voluntary, crowdsourced self-reporting database among child care centers, then also examined media reporting on cases, and sifted through state-reported surveys. The results are admittedly uneven and incomplete, and Oster herself warns that "we should all draw our own conclusions." Nevertheless, this is hers:

On the bad news side, the fact that we see some outbreaks here tells me that it is not realistic to expect no school outbreaks at all. In some cases, the large outbreaks cited above seem clearly linked to behaviors we'd hope schools would avoid, but it is simply not realistic to expect no clusters of cases to emerge. Some of these could be large.

But on the positive side: many child care centers and camps, even large ones and even in high prevalence areas, are operating without significant outbreaks. They are dealing with cases without having them turn into clusters….
It's easy to forget the denominator, but estimates suggest in the range of 5,000 summer camps are operating this summer, including perhaps 1,500 overnight camps. The number of child care centers in the U.S. is in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, it is concerning that there are 14 child care locations in North Carolina with clusters, but this is out of a total of about 6,500 locations.

I am grateful that Oster has gone to such lengths to provide at least the beginning of some context to the individual reports of kids contracting and spreading coronavirus. But I am irritated at how rare it is to see journalists treating this important question with similar care...


Residents of the Tampa Bay area of Florida reported receiving unsolicited masks from China at their addresses, potentially part of a “brushing” scheme to boost sales, local media reported this week.

One of these recipients was local resident Shan Sharp of Clearwater, who told local NBC news affiliate WLFA on Tuesday that she discovered two packages of masks when she recently went to open her mailbox.

“I looked at the label and it had Shanghai, China, from a certain district,” she said. “All of this information, including my cell phone number, (was) on there … I was afraid to even open it after I saw it. I didn’t want to keep it in my house.”

At that point, Sharp threw the package in the trash and called local investigative reporter Shannon Behnken, whose hotline “Better Call Behnken” describes itself as “devoted to exposing fraud, protecting consumers, and holding the powerful accountable.”

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Better Business Bureau (BBB), the packages are likely part of a deceitful technique known as “brushing,” where third-party sellers create fake orders in order to post positive reviews about themselves on sites such as Amazon.

As explained by the BBB:

The companies, usually foreign, third-party sellers that are sending the items are simply using your address that they discovered online. Their intention is to make it appear as though you wrote a glowing online review of their merchandise, and that you are a verified buyer of that merchandise. They then post a fake, positive review to improve their products’ ratings, which means more sales for them. The payoff is highly profitable from their perspective.

Masks are not the only product recently received by Americans. Last month, mysterious packages of Chinese seeds arrived at addresses across the country, leading to warnings from agriculture officials not to plant them. There were initially concerns that they could be used as a biological weapon, although they are now also believed to be part of the brushing scam.

Although some consumers may think “brushing” poses no risk to themselves, the BBB warns that once criminals have someone’s personal information they can use it for a number of illegal purposes.

“The fact that someone was able to have the items sent to you as if you purchased them indicates that they probably have some of your personal information such as your name, address, and possibly, your phone number,” the organization advises. “Once the information is out there on the internet, it could be used for numerous crooked enterprises.”

The federal deficit more than tripled in the first 10 months of the fiscal year, as government spending to combat the coronavirus continued to outpace federal tax collection, the Treasury Department said Wednesday.

The U.S. budget gap totaled $2.8 trillion from October through July, 224% bigger than the $867 billion gap during the same period a year earlier. The government has spent $5.6 trillion so far in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, 51% more than a year earlier, fueled in large part by the economic relief legislation Congress enacted in March to keep households and businesses afloat during the pandemic.

Total receipts for the fiscal year are down just 1%, totaling $2.8 trillion, thanks to an influx of revenue last month as individuals and corporations made tax payments that the government had delayed in April and June. Those figures mostly reflect revenue based on income and business activity from before the pandemic, and are likely to shrink in the months ahead as the economy slowly emerges from a deep downturn that led to widespread business closures and millions of layoffs.

Federal spending has soared after Congress approved trillions in economic relief measures, including enhanced unemployment benefits, stimulus checks for households and emergency small-business loans. That spending began to taper off last month: Outlays totaled $626 billion, 70% more than July 2019 but about half of what they were in June, when the government issued billions in emergency loans to small businesses.

Higher spending on jobless benefits, health care, stimulus checks and aid for state and local governments drove the increases last month.

Over the 12 months that ended in July, deficits as a share of gross domestic product totaled 15.1%, the highest 12-month shortfall since February 2010, when the deficit-to-GDP ratio was 10.1%.

Talks over another major aid package have stalled on Capitol Hill, in part over concerns from some Republicans about rising red ink. Deficits typically rise during recessions, as spending on safety-net programs like jobless benefits and food assistance increases, while unemployment weighs on tax revenue.

The U.S. budget gap was already widening in the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, following 2017 tax cuts that constrained revenues and two bipartisan budget deals that boosted federal spending.

The latest deficit figures are in line with earlier estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which has projected the annual deficit could total $3.7 trillion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

Swelling deficits have led to a surge in government borrowing. The Treasury Department said last week it expects to borrow $4.5 trillion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, more than triple last year’s $1.28 trillion.


Consumer prices excluding food and energy rose the most in one month in nearly 30 years in July, but the unexpected increase is seen more as a recovery from the Covid-19 recessionary hit rather than the start of an inflationary spiral.

Core inflation, less food and energy, was up 0.6%, and is now running at a 1.6% rate year over year on an unadjusted basis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the biggest jump since January 1991, but it is still considered to be a low rate and it is below the Fed’s 2% target.

Headline CPI also increased 0.6% on a seasonally adjusted basis in July, twice as much as expected. Year over year, the consumer price index was up 1% on an unadjusted basis, compared with expectations for just a 0.7% hike.

“I don’t think it’s a worry. It’s not going to be on the Fed’s radar screen. They’re just going to take it as an offset of the months of declines. We fell exactly 0.6% over March, April and May,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank.

Some investors have been expecting the Fed’s easy money programs and high federal deficits to spur a wave of inflation by next year. Chairman Jerome Powell said after the last meeting that the Fed was more wary of disinflationary pressures. 

“Prices are coming back. We’re back to square one,” said Rupkey. “We’re back to seeing where the true trend lies. I don’t think that’s stoking the fires of inflation. ... The Fed’s opened the spigot here. We’re doing money printing. I would not take this as a sign inflation is back and the inflation genie has escaped its bottle.”

A 5.6% increase in gasoline prices accounted for about a quarter of the jump in headline inflation, while food prices actually declined by 0.4%, the first drop since April 2019. Gasoline is down 20% year over year, while food prices are up 4.1% on the year.

Stocks shrugged off the higher inflation reading and moved higher.

Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial, said the jump in inflation is a one-month move and not a concern to the market unless it becomes persistent. “You want to see a healthy climb in prices again. It suggests economic activity is picking up. But you don’t want to see a galloping move in prices,” she said.

The dollar moved slightly lower against its global peers, as the U.S. currency slipped against the euro after the data. Spot gold prices rose slightly. Treasury yields were mostly steady, with the 10-year note at 0.67% ahead of a 1 p.m. ET auction.

“The fact we saw an increase in inflation make up for weakness from earlier this year is evidence of further healing of the economy,” said Jon Hill, senior fixed income strategist at BMO. “Eventually this will give way to a slow recovery with a likely return to low inflation. We’re going to see volatility in the month-to-month numbers as things get back on track. It’s serving as a reminder the price pressures are stabilizing. We’re going to avoid a deflationary trap.”

In the market for Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, 5-year breakevens were 6.5 basis points higher, reaching 157 basis points, the highest since Feb. 24. That means the Treasury market is pricing about a 1.6% average inflation rate over the next five years.

“That’s still below 2%, the Fed’s target,” Hill said.

But Peter Boockvar, chief investment strategist at Bleakley Advisory Group, said the data shows inflation may already be here and that could be evident in the higher-than-expected producer price index and CPI.

The stock market has been boosted by the idea that the Fed will not need to raise rates for a long time to cover, so rising inflation would change that outlook.

“If this continues, it will be the Fed’s worst nightmare no matter how many times they say they want higher inflation. Treasury yields are at the highs of the day and while stocks don’t’ seem to care, the inflated areas of the market should,” Boockvar said in a note.

“Own commodity related names, banks and any company that has pricing power. ... The world’s level of asset prices have feasted on many years of ever lower rates and low inflation,” he added. “Just think about the possibility of that regime changing and invest accordingly. Sorry for the hyperbole but we should all be always assessing the state of things and looking for possible inflection points. Maybe, just maybe, this is one of them.”

In the CPI, the cost of some services jumped sharply. Motor vehicle insurance was up 9.3% in July, on top of a 5.1% increase in June. Wireless telephone services rose 3.6%.

Goods also rose. Prices for used cars and trucks climbed 2.3%, while new car prices increased 0.8%.
Airline fares also rose, up 5.4% in July, on top of a 2.6% jump in June. Shelter costs rose 0.2%, or 2.3% year over year. 

The cost of food at home fell 1.1%, after rising 0.7% in June. Food away from home also rose 0.5% in both June and July, as restaurants reopened and consumers could have more meals outside of their homes.
The government said the cost of food at home index rose 4.6% over the last 12 months, with gains in six major grocery store food groups. Beef was up 14.2% , while fruits and vegetables were up 2.3% over the 12 months.

Global efforts to contain the coronavirus have resulted in fewer cases of influenza in countries now in the midst of winter. Experts say that what occurs in the Southern Hemisphere typically predicts what the U.S. will experience when winter arrives.

According to NBC News, experts have been worried that a double whammy of battling COVID-19 along with the seasonal flu could overwhelm the healthcare system. But efforts made to curb the spread of the coronavirus may positively affect our flu season.

“If we look at what they’ve been seeing in Australia, and we use the Southern Hemisphere to predict what our next season is gong to be, they’ve had a quieter flu season,” Kristin Englund, M.D., of Cleveland Clinic told NBC News. “We think it’s because people have been using measures to prevent COVID-19.”

Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that during the 2019-2020 U.S. flu season, there were as many as 56 million cases of the flu, requiring up to 740,000 hospitalizations. The flu may have caused the deaths of 62,000 Americans.

Englund recommended that people get the flu shot but said it’s best to wait until October.

“If people get the flu vaccine now, protection may not extend throughout the entire flu season,” she said, according to NBC News. Because flu symptoms mimic those of COVID-19, experts said that it may be difficult to tell them apart and doctors will likely test for both illnesses using the same samples.

According to Medical News Today, the incubation period for COVID-19 is between one and 14 days, while for the flu, it’s between one and four days... The main message to help protect you and your loved ones from either illness is to continue wearing masks, washing your hands and avoiding large gatherings, experts told NBC.

Today, America has a choice of two paths. We can embrace the foundational principles that created this nation of limited government and individual liberty. Or we can veer down the path of bigger, more intrusive government that promises to solve all our problems if we just turn over more of our freedom and our paychecks. 

The difference between the two paths recently has become even starker as those on the left have gotten more radical. They have sought to destroy the lives of those who disagree with them, rewrite history to teach our children that America was illegitimate from the start, and express solidarity with those rioting across the country. 

This future-altering choice reminds me of 1964 when Ronald Reagan spoke about a similar decision the American people faced. “A Time for Choosing” was Mr. Reagan’s indictment of big government policies and the deceptive lure of socialism. Amazingly, his warnings are just as applicable today as they were nearly six decades ago.

He gave “A Time for Choosing” shortly after President Lyndon Johnson introduced his “Great Society” proposal, which created new welfare programs, expanded food stamps, gave birth to Medicaid and Medicare, and inserted the federal government into local education, among other massive expansions of government.

Like conservatives of today, Mr. Reagan expressed a grave concern that too many Americans saw more government as the solution to their problems, even though by 1964, history had already shown that bigger government actually was the problem.

For example, he spoke of how government programs to eradicate poverty hadn’t solved much of anything: “If government planning and welfare had the answer and they’ve had almost 30 years of it,… shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help?”

In recent years, we’ve spent about a trillion dollars a year on federal welfare programs. Divide that up among the 40 million or so Americans considered poor, and we could have given a family of four $100,000 a year. Yet, the poverty rate has stayed about the same as it was when the War on Poverty began in 1964. Tragically, most welfare programs have only been successful at creating perpetual reliance on government.

Mr. Reagan also pointed out that, despite the fact that Washington was collecting unprecedented amounts of money from taxpayers in 1964, it never seemed to be enough: “Today, 37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in.”

Washington’s poor fiscal restraint has only gotten worse. In 2019, the government spent $2.7 billion a day more than it took in, and currently, the national debt exceeds $80,000 for every man, woman, and child. 

Yet today, despite years of failures, just like back then, the left continues to promote policies that usurp our freedom, harm our economy, endanger our security, and create an unhealthy dependence on government. 

Today, they’re proposing government-run single-payer health care and cutting our military when those who want to do us harm are increasing theirs. They want to defund the police across America, putting out the neighborhood welcome mat for criminals everywhere. They’ve proposed climate legislation that would eliminate gas-powered cars, ground all airplanes, and forbid beef consumption. Their proposals would guarantee every person in America access to free health care, free college, and even a free paycheck—paid for with massive tax increases.

Mr. Reagan urged Americans to resist the lure of these types of big government programs coming from their leaders. He said that the issue was “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” 

As polls show more Americans warming up to socialism, conservatives need to take a few lessons from The Great Communicator. We must better convey how policy solutions based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual liberty, traditional American values, and a strong national defense are what made this nation great—and what will continue to make life better for all Americans. 

This is another time for choosing for America, and the path we choose will affect generations of Americans to come. 

Those who promote socialism haven’t given up on their plans for America, and neither can we. If we are able to succeed in taking a coherent, compelling argument to the American people that spells out why free market, conservative solutions are better for them than the false promises of socialist Utopianism, we will, in Mr. Reagan’s words, “preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth.” 

That must be our mission, and the future of America surely depends on our success.