Note: Please do not reply to this email as replies will not be reviewed. If you have a question or comment, click here.
Current as of Oct. 5, 2020, at 7:00 a.m.
COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
  • Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here.

Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step.

Florida’s Reemployment Assistance Dashboard: 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 - 2.1%
  • Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
  • 15-24 years old - .03%
  • 25-34 years old - .07%
  • 35-44 years old - .23%
  • 45-54 years old - .54%
  • 55-64 years old - 1.7%
  • 65-74 years old - 5.7%
  • 75 and up - 17.9%
  • Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%

  • Median age of new Covid cases - 39 years old
  • Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 20% decrease
  • ICU beds available in Florida - 26%
  • Hospital beds available in Florida - 29%

Vaccine Tracking

Last updated: October 1, 2020 9:00 AM PST

213
vaccines are in development.

35
are now in clinical testing.

In 1932, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states “laboratories of democracy.” Different states can test out different policies, and they can learn from each other. That proved true in 2020. Governors in different states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic at different times and in different ways. Some states, such as California, ordered sweeping shutdowns. Others, such as Florida, took a more targeted approach. Still others, such as South Dakota, dispensed information but had no lockdowns at all.

As a result, we can now compare outcomes in different states, to test the question no one wants to ask: Did the lockdowns make a difference?

If lockdowns really altered the course of this pandemic, then coronavirus case counts should have clearly dropped whenever and wherever lockdowns took place. The effect should have been obvious, though with a time lag. It takes time for new coronavirus infections to be officially counted, so we would expect the numbers to plummet as soon as the waiting time was over.

How long? New infections should drop on day one and be noticed about ten or eleven days from the beginning of the lockdown. By day six, the number of people with first symptoms of infection should plummet (six days is the average time for symptoms to appear). By day nine or ten, far fewer people would be heading to doctors with worsening symptoms. If COVID-19 tests were performed right away, we would expect the positives to drop clearly on day ten or eleven (assuming quick turnarounds on tests).

To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. The charts below show the daily case curves for the United States as a whole and for thirteen U.S. states. As in almost every country, we consistently see a steep climb as the virus spreads, followed by a transition (marked by the gray circles) to a flatter curve. At some point, the curves always slope downward, though this wasn’t obvious for all states until the summer.

The lockdowns can’t be the cause of these transitions. In the first place, the transition happened even in places without lockdown orders (see Iowa and Arkansas). And where there were lockdowns, the transitions tended to occur well before the lockdowns could have had any serious effect. The only possible exceptions are California, which on March 19 became the first state to officially lock down, and Connecticut, which followed four days later.

Even in these places, though, the downward transitions probably started before the lockdowns could have altered the curves. The reason is that a one-day turnaround for COVID-19 test results probably wasn’t met in either state. On March 30, the Los Angeles Times reported the turnaround time to be eight days. That would make the delay from infection to confirmation not the 10 we assumed, but more like 17 days (6 for symptoms to appear, 3 for them to develop, and 8 for test processing). In early April, the Hartford Courant reported similar problems with delayed test results in Connecticut.

What’s more, there’s no decisive drop on the dates when lockdowns should have changed the course of the curves. Instead, the curves gradually bend downward for reasons that predate the lockdowns, with no clear changes ten days later.

Lockdown partisans might say that the curves would have been higher after the ten-day mark without the lockdown. While we can’t redo history to prove them wrong, the point is that the sudden and dramatic changes we should see if they were right aren’t there. If we showed people these curves without any markings, they would not be able to discern when or even if lockdowns went into effect.

The vertical lines mark the date when the number of deaths attributed to the coronavirus reached five per million people in the population. This is probably the best way to mark similar extents of viral progress in each state, since we don’t know how many total cases there were.

The curves usually start to bend somewhere around the same death toll (roughly five per million people), which suggests that the approach of herd immunity caused the bends. In other words, we see in this data not only a lack of evidence that lockdowns caused the curves to bend, but also evidence of the very early stages of herd immunity.

In fact, a May 18 column in the New York Times argued that coronavirus cases in New York City probably peaked before the state lockdown began on March 22. Though that newspaper is not known for taking a critical stance on lockdowns, this point implies that the spread was slowing before the mayor and governor even ordered the lockdown.

Something caused this overall decline. It couldn’t have been lockdowns, which weren’t maintained (or heeded) in full force through June. At the moment, we can only speculate. But if this virus is like others, its decline is likely attributable to some mix of changing seasons and the gradual onset of herd immunity. Another factor, of course, could be the widespread use of masks as the year progressed.

The evidence suggests, then, that the sweeping, mandated lockdowns that followed voluntary responses exacted a great cost, with little effect on transmission. We can’t change the past, but we should avoid making the same mistake again.

The private U.S. economy added 877,000 new jobs in September, but you’d think from the coverage that this was bad news. While the pace of hiring has slowed since the summer, the economy and labor market still have plenty of growth momentum.

Overall job gains in the month were 661,000 as government shed 216,000, including 34,000 temporary Census workers. The jobless rate nonetheless fell another half percentage point to 7.9%, and July and August showed upward revisions of 145,000 jobs. In any normal period, this report would have been hailed as outstanding.

But this was the last jobs report before Nov. 3, so the political accent is to look for the negative. There was some of that, as labor force participation declined 0.3 percentage points to 61.4% as 695,000 workers stopped looking for jobs. Participation fell 0.8 percentage points for women age 20 and older versus 0.2 points for men. School closures have surely sidelined many working mothers.

Local governments shed 231,000 workers in public education. This is no surprise as schools that are closed need fewer workers. Local governments added 96,000 non-education jobs last month so they don’t seem starved for cash.

Notably, leisure and hospitality added 318,000 jobs, as many states eased restrictions on restaurants and bars. Hiring was also strong in retail (142,400) and transportation and warehousing (73,600). The pandemic is accelerating creative destruction in retail as online companies hire to fill more digital orders.

Amazon says it plans to open as many as 1,500 small warehouses in the suburbs to compete with Walmart and Target. Businesses that are investing and expanding their workforces will provide fuel for the recovery. But they need workers and, believe it or not, a labor shortage may be constraining employment growth in parts of the country.

The National Federation of Independent Business said Thursday that 36% of small businesses had job openings they couldn’t fill. Sixty percent of construction firms reported few or no qualified applicants, and 30% cited a shortage of qualified labor as their top problem. While the $600 weekly federal enhanced unemployment benefits expired July 31, many businesses still say President Trump’s $300 extension is making it harder to attract workers.

The biggest brake on job growth continues to be government restrictions on business. Unemployment is significantly lower in metro regions like Sioux City (5.1%), Green Bay (5.6%), Phoenix (5.9%) and Dallas (6.3%) that are opening faster than Los Angeles (15%), New York City (13%), Chicago (11.7%), Boston (10.8%) and Buffalo (10.8%).

Disney this week announced 28,000 layoffs at its amusement parks and blamed in part the state of California’s “unwillingness to lift restrictions that would allow Disneyland to reopen.” Its parks in Japan, France, China and Florida have reopened.

Talks continue in Washington on another giant spending bill, but more transfer payments won’t make Americans worried about catching Covid suddenly get on a plane. Or a restaurant required to limit capacity hire more workers. Note that per capita incomes were still higher in August than in February because the $300 in enhanced unemployment benefits more than made up for wage losses. The savings rate was 14.1% in August, so workers still have money to spend. The economic recovery will continue and broaden if politicians allow it.

With several vaccines against COVID-19 in late-phase testing, the business of measuring efficacy is front and center.

Determining the efficacy, or how well a vaccine works in a randomized, controlled trial, gives a sense of how much a vaccine could help alleviate the suffering caused by COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends vaccines tested against COVID-19 reach an efficacy of 50 percent, at minimum. That means at least a 50 percent reduction in cases of COVID-19 disease in those who are vaccinated compared with those who receive the placebo.

Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca have each begun phase III trials of their vaccines in the United States. These late-phase trials, which will each assess safety and efficacy in tens of thousands of people, randomly assign some participants to receive vaccinations and others a placebo. The companies and the U.S. government, working together as part of Operation Warp Speed, have set a goal of having initial doses of a vaccine available by January 2021 (SN: 7/10/20). It won’t be clear how well any of these vaccines do their job until the companies report full results from those trials; some preliminary results may come out as early as October.

The FDA setting a minimum recommendation for efficacy doesn’t mean vaccines couldn’t perform better. The benchmark is also a reminder that COVID-19 vaccine development is in its early days. If the first vaccines made available only meet the minimum, they may be replaced by others that prove to protect more people. But with more than 1 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide — and U.S. deaths surpassing 200,000 — the urgency in finding a vaccine that safely helps at least some people is at the forefront.

“You want to set the bar [for efficacy] high enough so that it is clinically and epidemiologically significant, but low enough that a ‘good enough’ vaccine can be licensed until something better comes along,” says Kawsar Talaat, a vaccine researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The World Health Organization has also set a minimum target of 50 percent efficacy for vaccines tested against COVID-19, but its “preferred efficacy” is at least 70 percent.

Efficacy specifically applies to how a vaccine works in a clinical trial. For the four vaccine candidates now in phase III trials in the United States, the primary goal is not necessarily to stop an infection but to prevent a person from experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 or, in Johnson & Johnson’s case, to guard against moderate to severe illness. Researchers will count cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the vaccinated group and in the placebo group (who get injections of saline, for example) and calculate how much of a reduction there was with vaccination.

“At least with the first generation of vaccines,” Talaat says, “what we’re really trying to do is prevent severe disease and hospitalization and death.”

A vaccine that prevents people from developing symptoms may not stop them from becoming infected and passing the virus to others. If such a vaccine gets approved, what the vaccine does and doesn’t do would need to be communicated very clearly, says Maria Bottazzi, a vaccinologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. People would still need to wear masks and practice social distancing to help keep the virus from spreading, she says.

The efficacy results won’t be the final word on how effective the vaccine is in the real world. That’s one reason “why it’s always a good idea to have a more diverse population in your trials,” says Saad Omer, a vaccine researcher at Yale University. That way, researchers can gather data on how the vaccine works for different people in a variety of scenarios.

Studies of other vaccines in which a trial took place in different locations have reported different results based on the incidence of disease in those areas; some vaccines haven’t worked as well in populations where the risk of exposure is higher. In this pandemic, Black and Latino Americans are disproportionately represented in the essential jobs that can’t be done at home, putting them at risk for more exposures to the coronavirus (SN: 7/2/20).
A person’s age also affects how well a vaccine will work. Our immune system “ages as we age too,” says Bottazzi. When older adults get the flu vaccine, for example, the shot doesn’t elicit as strong an immune response as it does in younger adults. In the United States, adults ages 65 and older can get specially formulated flu vaccines that create a stronger immune response and better protection for this age group.

For the COVID-19 vaccine trials, the FDA has strongly encouraged “enrollment of populations most affected by COVID-19, specifically racial and ethnic minorities.” The agency also states that the phase III trials should include enough older adults and people with certain underlying medical conditions, two groups at increased risk for COVID-19, to be able to evaluate efficacy for them.

How well the first COVID-19 vaccines work, and for whom, will influence who is initially prioritized to receive the vaccine. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues guidance on the use of vaccines in the general population. To recommend a COVID-19 vaccine for older adults, for example, there has to be data to show that it works for them.

There are other COVID-19 vaccines in development and testing; some aren’t very far behind the front runners. Even if one or more of the vaccines now in phase III trials gets the green light, “the story wouldn’t be over,” says Omer. “It would be the end of the beginning.”

Who controls the past, controls the future.

In this matter of history, freedom is at stake, but also our humanity is at stake. America having been made for humans, the nation is at stake too. 

In the novel 1984 (1949), the job of the protagonist Winston Smith is to rewrite history. He is one of thousands, likely millions, who rewrite every account of past things: every newspaper and magazine article; every book of every kind; anything written down they adjust to the changing desires of the regime. The new versions are reprinted in an endless stream. 

These alterations concern big things like with whom the nation was at war, and little things like whether some middling official was a hero or a villain. Winston, secretly alienated from the regime, does not fully understand why he undertakes his work until the end of the novel. Here, in a series of conversations that are among the great contrivances of literature, a member of the inner party named O’Brien explains to Winston, as he tortures him, the purpose of these revisions: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Teaching philosophy by torture is characteristic of the regime. 

This dark novel is only restating the theme that can be found in writing about despotism that goes back to the classics. It is in Book V of Aristotle’s Politics. It is in the grim and profound novel Darkness at Noon (1940). It is in the apparently happy world described in Brave New World (1932), where the classic books are kept locked in a safe for the private enjoyment exclusively of the world controller Mustapha Mond. 

The key to understanding the slogan of the regime in 1984 is that tyranny, to be complete, to be perfectly itself, must overturn nature or reality. Only then can the passion for power run free. The part of reality about which we can know the most is the past. The present is fleeting and constantly changing, and the future is not yet here. This gives rise to the great doctrine of Aristotle, repeated in Thomas Aquinas and in many great places: “This alone is denied even to God: to make what has been not to have been.” If there is any reality, the past is not malleable. 

Today our children are being raised in the gloomy light of a false view of our history. This view is legislated and enforced through centralized standards and textbooks that proceed from Washington, D.C. and the capitals of the biggest states. It is reinforced in schools of education across the land where teachers are trained. It is ingrained in graduate schools, where the teachers of teachers are trained. In its most radical statements it does not even pretend to be true. It is a perspective committed entirely to fashionable and “correct” attitudes. 

Here is a simple example: students all learn that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and that he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Therefore he was a hypocrite. In some ways he was, but you cannot quite claim him to be a hypocrite unless you study what he says. And what he says consistently about slavery is that it is wrong and must be got rid of. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just…. The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII: Manners, 1781) 

Children today do not learn this, nor do they learn that Jefferson the slaveholder understood the Declaration to condemn the practice of slavery, and that Jefferson the slaveholder was the prime agent in assuring that the first land upon which our union expanded, the Northwest Territory, would be forever without slaves. If they learned this it would open the way for them to love and know their country better, but also it would open the way for them to understand things better, because things are like that: never perfect. The soul that knows this growing up knows that life will be full of challenges and that it must try to do well, even if it cannot do perfectly. Nevertheless, it is worth the striving. 

In such failures of education we are laying the groundwork for an overturning of two things: first, our connection with the great principles of America that have militated against the evils that are common in both our history and our present and in the history and present of every land occupied by every people; and secondly, our attachment to the forms of government, above all the Constitution, by which the American people remain in control of the awesome power of government. 

The relationship between the final cause of the union, the Declaration of Independence, and the formal cause, the Constitution, was stated sublimely by Abraham Lincoln as so many things were. Quoting the Bible, Lincoln said that “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” The Apple in this image is the Declaration, the frame of silver is the Constitution. We should cling to both of them. We must learn once again how to study and teach history and find the truth, both tragic and sublime, in its stories.