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Current as of August 18, 2020, at 7:30 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 - 1.7%
- 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 - .06%
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35-44 years old - .20%
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45-54 years old - .44%
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55-64 years old - 1.4%
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65-74 years old - 4.6%
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75 and up - 15.0%
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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 - 44 years old
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Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 34% decrease
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ICU beds available in Florida - 23%
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Hospital beds available in Florida - 27%
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Vaccine Tracking
Last updated: August 17, 2020 7:57 AM PST
202
vaccines are in development.
25
are now in clinical testing.
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Even though the U.S. saw a rapid rise in cases during June and July, the overall levels of concentration have remained fairly consistent.
As our research has pointed out, state-level figures do not adequately describe the concentrated nature of the spread of COVID-19.
As of Aug. 11, the 30 counties with the most COVID-19 deaths, for example, account for 26% of all the cases in the U.S. and 43% of all deaths, much greater than their 17% share of the U.S. population. That is, just 1% of the counties in the U.S., representing 17% of the population, are responsible for almost half of the country’s COVID-19 deaths.
Of those 30 counties, 23 are in the Northeast corridor between Philadelphia and Boston, the passageway served by a commuter railway system that runs through Manhattan.
Overall, only about 10% of the counties in the U.S. contain 90% of all the COVID-19 deaths, even though these counties include 60% of the population.
Throughout the pandemic, there have been many U.S. counties with relatively few COVID-19 deaths. For instance, as of May 11, 64% of all counties (16% of the population) had one or fewer COVID-19 deaths. As of Aug. 11, 37% of all counties (5% of the population) have no more than one COVID-19 death each.
While these numbers obviously have declined since May, many counties still have a relatively small number of COVID-19 deaths. In particular, as of Aug. 11, 58% of all counties (12% of the population) have five or fewer COVID-19 deaths.
Heritage’s new interactive graphic allows individuals to see more detail on these concentrations among the counties with the most deaths as well as those with the fewest.
For instance, the graphic allows users to select data from the five counties with the most deaths, all the way up to the 50 counties with the most deaths. It also allows visitors to select data from counties with zero deaths, all the way to counties with 10 or fewer.
Once a category is selected, the graphic provides the percentage of counties represented by the category, the percentage of the population contained in those counties, and the percentage of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths in those counties.
For example, as of Aug. 11, 68.2% of all counties are reporting 10 or fewer deaths. These counties represent 16.7% of the population, and account for only 2.9% of total COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.
In contrast, the five counties with the most COVID-19 deaths represent just 0.2% of all counties, but they account for 18% of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., nearly three times their population share of 6.5%.
A list of the 50 counties with the most deaths is also provided, and this list has not changed very much since April. New York, for instance, recorded 32,477 deaths as of Aug. 11.
The five counties of New York City saw 23,561 recorded deaths from COVID-19. Excluding Richmond County (Staten Island), four of these counties are in the top 10 counties with the most recorded COVID-19 deaths. Nassau County in New York also makes the Top 5.
Compared to other places that have been considered hotspots, it is clear that New York City’s outbreak is, so far, much more severe.
For comparison, California recorded 10,650 COVID-19 deaths. Los Angeles County makes the Top 5 of most deaths from COVID-19 at 4,967 deaths, and the greater Los Angeles region recorded 7,257 deaths—less than one-third of the deaths to date in New York City.
Now that COVID-19 testing has increased dramatically and many state and local governments have relaxed stay-at-home orders, it is even more critical to study the trends in deaths along with cases. To make studying these trends easier, The Heritage Foundation now has two interactive COVID-19 trackers. One tracks trends in cases, the other tracks trends in deaths.
The trackers describe whether the trend of cases—or deaths—is increasing or decreasing over the prior 14 days, and provides a visual depiction of new cases—or deaths—during this time period.
These tools help put the concentrated nature of the pandemic in perspective with county-level data. They show just how difficult it can be to use only one metric to gauge whether a county—or state—is doing well.
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Heritage's New Graphic Tool
While the death toll in the U.S. from COVID-19 continues to increase, a significant proportion of those deaths have occurred in just a handful of counties. In fact, the 30 counties with the most deaths represent 1 percent of all counties in the U.S.
Read more
www.heritage.org
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Early on in the pandemic, I wrote a policy brief for the National Taxpayers Union Foundation warning of the danger of tax hikes and otherwise inadvisable tax policies coming out of revenue-starved state houses during a recession. As with most predictions that one hopes will prove unfounded, this one is of course coming true.
Also unsurprising is that it is California leading the bad-policy charge (not that the state has ever needed a recession to pass ill-advised proposals). Members of the state legislature have proposed combating budget pressures by boosting its already-high 13.3 percent top marginal tax rate to 16.8 percent.
And the cherry on top is a proposed 0.4 percent wealth tax. A 0.4 percent rate may sound low, but that’s largely a function of the way wealth taxes work. When income taxes, for example, are assessed on a taxpayer’s annual income, that income will never have to face income taxes again. Wealth taxes, on the other hand, are assessed on the same wealth year after year.
Even the lower end of national wealth tax proposals, with rates that start at 1 or 2 percent, can have serious consequences for entrepreneurship and private charities. Considering state taxes are generally supposed to be the lighter burden compared to federal taxes, even a 0.4 percent wealth tax is substantial. Furthermore, were other states to adopt similar taxes, the cumulative effect could be massive.
And while California deserves the Golden Raspberry, other states could easily catch up with their own poor ideas. The New York-based Fiscal Policy Institute recently recommended the implementation of a mark-to-market regime, or taxation of unrealized capital gains on an annual basis. I’ve explained in more detail the problems with such a regime in the past, but suffice it to say that it would be a difficult-to-implement system that would require state investment in administration and create substantial tax compliance burdens for the taxpayer — both things that are particularly infeasible in the midst of a pandemic.
New York has also been guilty of aggressively taxing remote workers. From hitting medical workers who volunteered to come to the state with tax bills to its rules that let it double-tax remote workers’ income, New York could cost a lot of taxpayers a lot of money come next April. Fortunately, Congress is currently considering preemptions that would address this problem as part of its Phase Four relief efforts.
Now more than ever, taxpayers must be wary of cities and states taking the easy way out of budget holes by raising taxes instead of doing the hard and politically unpopular work of trimming extraneous spending. After all, the last thing taxpayers need right now is greater tax burdens and further millstones on the economy.
Congress has proposed a $25 billion bailout for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) as part of the latest COVID-19 stimulus bill, but it's unlikely that any amount of cash will be enough to stabilize the agency's finances. Postmaster General Megan Brennan told the House Oversight Committee in April that the postal service stands to lose $13 billion this year. That's an acceleration of an ongoing trend, not a new problem created by the coronavirus pandemic; the post office has lost $69 billion since 2007.
In May, a report from the Government Accountability Office called the agency's business model "not financially sustainable"—a conclusion it had reached before the impact of the coronavirus was factored in. The report called for Congress to make changes to "critical foundational elements" of how USPS operates. In other words, COVID-19 might be an easy scapegoat to justify a federal bailout, but the pandemic is not the main problem, and a bailout would not be a permanent solution.
Thanks to congressional mandates, the USPS has been unable to adapt to a changing marketplace. First-class mail has declined 44 percent since 2006, but Congress has rejected proposals that would free the postal service to operate more like a business, instead requiring the agency to deliver mail everywhere six days per week regardless of cost efficiency.
Second, like many government entities, the USPS has overpromised and undersaved when it comes to employee retirement benefits. At the end of 2019, the postal workers' pension fund had $50 billion in unfunded liabilities—the gap between what the fund expects to owe beneficiaries over the long term and the revenue it expects to collect from paychecks and investment earnings. Meanwhile, the fund that covers health care expenses for retired postal workers is facing a $69 billion unfunded liability. The pandemic's economic impact has made both situations worse.
President Donald Trump has called for the USPS to raise prices, particularly on packages. He believes the agency is giving a free ride to Amazon and other online retailers. USPS has already tried that—the shipping price for the agency's largest flat-rate box has gone from $14.50 in 2010 to $21.10 this year, for example—but price increases are limited by market conditions (since the USPS does not have a monopoly on package shipments) and congressional mandates.
Rather than more bailouts or slightly different mandates, Congress should set the postal service free. Privatizing it in whole or in part would allow the USPS to make smart changes to its business model while guaranteeing that taxpayers aren't on the hook for yet another massive bailout in a year or two.
Gold jumped over 2% to its highest in nearly a week on Monday as a weaker dollar, a pull-back in U.S. Treasury yields along with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway buying a stake in major gold miner bolstered investor morale.
Spot gold climbed 1.9% to $1,981.41 an ounce and U.S. gold futures settled up 2.5% at $1,998.70.
Gold last week registered its biggest decline since March as investors reassessed positions after bullion retreated sharply from a record peak of $2,072.50 scaled on Aug. 7.
“The sharp pullback in prices and the price action that has followed has revealed quite a bit about the underlying extent of speculative appetite for precious metals,” said Daniel Ghali, commodity strategist at TD Securities, adding that the fact Warren Buffett has now “embraced gold” is helping sentiment.
A regulatory filing on Friday disclosed Berkshire Hathaway’s new 20.9 million share investment in one of the world’s largest mining companies, Barrick Gold Corp.
“Recognizing that he has bought a stock and not gold commodity itself, it does provide a compelling narrative for those that were looking to buy gold and perhaps remained on the sidelines, but the positive sentiment now is helping them pull the trigger,” Ghali added.
Also helping gold, the dollar fell to a more than one-week low, benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note yields eased and the New York Fed’s Empire State Manufacturing Survey index dropped to 3.7.
Investors now await the minutes from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s last policy meeting on Wednesday.
“The market expects the Fed to be very supportive, we’ll be above $2,000 per ounce before Fed minutes, and north of $2,250 by the end of year,” said Bob Haberkorn, senior market strategist at RJO Futures.
Elsewhere, silver rose 3.7% to $27.37 an ounce, platinum gained 1.5% to $950.03 and palladium jumped 4.1% to $2,194.55.
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Thousands of letters stuffed with money flooded Jonas Salk’s mailbox the week after his polio vaccine was declared safe and effective in 1955. Everybody wanted his vaccine. Desperate parents clogged doctors’ phone lines in search of the precious elixir; drug companies and doctors diverted doses to the rich and famous.
Some of the first batches of the vaccine were disastrously botched, causing 200 cases of permanent paralysis. That barely dented public desire for the preventive. Marlon Brando even asked to play Salk in a movie.
Eight years later, with polio a fading threat, the first measles vaccines went on sale. Measles had killed more than 400 children the year before and caused permanent brain damage in thousands more. Interest in the vaccine was modest. Its creator, Maurice Hilleman, was never lionized as Salk had been.
“People felt, ‘What’s the big deal? I had measles; why does my kid need a vaccine?’ It was a very difficult sell,” said Walter Orenstein, an Emory University professor who headed the national immunization program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1988 to 2004.
When a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, will it be met with a roaring ovation, like the polio vaccine, or communal yawning, like the measles shot? Or some strange hybrid of the two? Americans’ trust in authority, affordable access to the vaccine and a sense of solidarity will determine the result, said Orenstein and other public health veterans and historians.
Perceptions of particular diseases — and vaccines — reflect the seriousness of the diseases themselves, but popular values, culture, human risk assessment and politics all play important roles. Acceptance of public health measures — be they face masks or vaccines — is never entirely determined through a rational balancing of risk and benefit.
We can see that in the history of national campaigns for new vaccines meant to vanquish a scourge. No disease was more feared in the mid-20th century than polio. With the possible exception of AIDS, no disease since has been as feared until the arrival of COVID-19.
The polio vaccine was one of the few the public greeted eagerly. Diseases like measles and whooping cough were familiar childhood afflictions. In most years they killed more children than polio, but polio, which put people in iron lungs and leg braces, was visible in ways that an infant’s death certificate, tucked away in a drawer, could never be.
Vaccines are often a hard sell, since they prevent rather than cure disease and seem scary even though they are generally quite safe. Since vaccines must be widely used to prevent outbreaks, successful vaccination campaigns rely heavily on trust in those who sell, recommend and administer the medicines. And trust in science, government and business has not always been in steady supply.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when public health laws were in flux, authorities battling smallpox epidemics would often send vaccinators out with police to enforce the jab. They’d enter factories where cases had been reported, lock the doors and frog-march the workers through a vaccination line. The workers’ resistance was not unmerited; the vaccine sometimes caused swollen arms, fever and bacterial infections. Vaccination could cost a week’s missed wages.
Authorities had learned their lesson by the 1920s, when the diphtheria vaccine came on the scene, as James Colgrove notes in his book “State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America.” Diphtheria was a much-feared killer of children, and publicity campaigns run by public health officials, insurance companies and charities sought to educate and persuade rather than coerce.
Polio terrified Americans, peaking in 1952 with more than 57,000 cases. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a polio patient, had begun a national scientific program to battle the disease, backed by millions of Americans’ contributions through the March of Dimes.
The result of this national quest, uniting government and the people, was Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine. It cemented a powerful post-World War II trust in the U.S. scientific and medical establishment that would endure for many years.
Social solidarity was also important.
Vaccines prevent the circulation of a disease among the unvaccinated via what scientists call herd immunity — if enough people are vaccinated. When a reliable rubella vaccine became available in 1969, states quickly required childhood vaccination, even though rubella was practically harmless in children.
They wanted to protect a vulnerable population — pregnant women — to prevent a repeat of the 1963-64 congenital rubella epidemic, which resulted in 30,000 fetal deaths and the birth of more than 20,000 babies with severe disabilities.
Still, it took a combination of fear, solidarity — and coercion — for Orenstein and his colleagues at the CDC and state public health agencies to drive childhood vaccination rates for measles, whooping cough, rubella and diphtheria to 90% and above in the 1990s to assure herd immunity.
Shame was also a tool. Orenstein remembered testifying to the Florida Legislature when it was considering a tougher vaccine mandate. He showed them that disease rates were lower in neighboring states that had tighter mandates. It worked.
What’s different now? In a politically divided nation, trust in science is low and experts are distrusted, politicians more so. Childhood vaccination efforts are already beset by large numbers of hesitant parents. And efforts to fight the COVID epidemic in the United States have been clumsy and chaotic at best, leaving Americans to doubt the competence of their governments and institutions.
There is still fear. “Maybe I’m an old-fashioned fool, but I think that most people will welcome a vaccine, if the rollout is done right,” said David Oshinsky, a professor of history at New York University and author of “Polio: An American Story,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning history. “Most people are desperately afraid of COVID. A minority thumb their noses, many of them for political reasons. How will this change when there’s a vaccine that [hopefully] changes the health risk equation to some degree?”
“A lot of people will be really eager to get it,” she said. “A lot will be hesitant, not only because of misinformation but because of a lack of trust in the current administration.”
When a coronavirus vaccine is introduced, it may be sold as personal protection, even for young, healthy people. But those who suffer most from the virus are usually older or sicker. An effective vaccination campaign may try to instill a sense of solidarity, or altruism, as well as a more general sense that without vaccination, the economy can’t get back on its feet.
“I’m not clear if people accept that solidarity,” Orenstein said. “People look more for what’s good for themselves than what’s good for society.” That said, the risk of COVID-19 to young people is “not zero. That’s one of the major ways to sell this, in a sense.”
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Hester Ford is now 115 — or 116. According to CBS, her family says U.S. Census Bureau documents indicate she was born in 1905, but another set of Census Bureau documents point to 1904. At 115 or 116, Ford is the oldest person on record alive in the nation, data compiled by the Gerontology Research Group showed as of July 30.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, relatives and friends drove by Ford's house in North Carolina to celebrate this year, leaving presents on the driveway, reported WBTV.
Her community and loved ones shared their birthday wishes on social media.
"It’s not every day you get the pleasure of attending a celebration for someone turning 116 years of age," CarePatrol of Charlotte, senior living services provider, wrote on Twitter.
"Many had the honor of seeing Mother #HesterFord celebrate her special day."
According to WBTV, Ford was born in South Carolina — where she picked and plowed cotton growing up. She married her late husband, John Ford, at 14. In addition to their 12 children, Ford has welcomed 68 grandchildren, 125 great-grandchildren, and at least 120 great-great-grandchildren.
The longest a human has ever lived is 122 years. Jeanne Calment, a French woman who lived to 122 years, died in August 1997.
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