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Current as of Oct. 12, 2020, at 7:00 a.m. |
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COVID-19 Testing Sites in Florida
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Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here.
Safe. Smart. Step-by-Step.
Graphs, Charts, and Real-time Tracking of COVID-19
Data Sources
Data Sources on Social Media
Other Resources
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Current Statistics
- Fatality rate in Florida - 2.1%
- 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 - .07%
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35-44 years old - .23%
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45-54 years old - .56%
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55-64 years old - 1.8%
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65-74 years old - 5.8%
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75 and up - 18.3%
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Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%
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Median age of new Covid cases - 38 years old
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Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 2% increase
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ICU beds available in Florida - 27%
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Hospital beds available in Florida - 28%
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Vaccine Tracking
Last updated: October 8, 2020 8:33 PM PST
213
vaccines are in development.
35
are now in clinical testing.
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The state DOH is citing a submission of approximately 400,000 previously-reported coronavirus test results from Helix Laboratory as the cause for the delay. Helix Laboratory is a private lab that is not affiliated with the state of Florida, according to a release.
"The massive size of the data file and the need to de-duplicate hundreds of thousands of results prevented the Department of Health's automatic reporting system from processing yesterday's results as it normally does," the DOH said...
The state stressed that this reporting issue is not related to notifying individuals of their test results. This is due to the notification of test results being in the hands of the lab or entity that offered the test to you.
"The Department remains committed to providing Floridians with the most accurate, up-to-date COVID-19 testing and surveillance information available," the DOH said.
Helix is a genomics company that developed a "highly automated COVID-19 test system," according to its website. Helix claims that it was working on being able to process up to 100,000 tests a day, making them "one of the nation's largest COVID-19 testing laboratories."
It also shows that Helix Laboratory returned a total of 64,582 test results, with Helix Diagnostics returning a total of 6 as of Oct. 8, regardless of if the test was positive, negative or inconclusive. The chart documenting this data is said to "represent the number of Florida and non-Florida residents for whom test results were received by the Department of Health."
10 Tampa Bay has reached out to Gov. Ron DeSantis' office and Helix Laboratory for additional information.
This issue, while rooted in re-reporting data comparatively to the lack of reporting data, is not the first test result dump that has led to complications with the state's COVID-19 report.
Last month Florida cut ties with Quest Diagnostics after the state said it failed to report nearly 75,000 COVID-19 test results, some of which dated back to April.
“It’s the most egregious dump we’ve had,” DeSantis said at the time.
When Disney World reopened in July, coronavirus cases were spiking in Florida and the decision to put thousands of people back to work was widely derided as a disaster in the making. The media rarely do a “we were wrong” story, preferring simply to move on to other dire predictions when initial dire predictions don’t come true so it’s admirable that the New York Times swallowed hard and published this story, albeit under the bizarrely negative headline, “At Disney World, ‘Worst Fears’ about Virus Have Not Come True.”
Worst fears? I’d say a more accurate headline would be “No Disney World Workers Have Come Down with COVID on the Job, Lead Union Says.”
No, as in zero. You have to get several paragraphs into the story before you come across this rather gobsmacking item: “’We’ve had very few, and none, as far as we can tell, have been from work-related exposure,’ said Eric Clinton, president of UNITE HERE Local 362, which represents roughly 8,000 attraction workers and custodians.”
None? As in nobody among 8,000 union workers at Disney World has been infected by coronavirus on the job? This is fantastic news. Other unions, according to the Times, tell a similar story. And workers presumably are at far greater risk than visitors, since workers are there every day. And this is three months after the park reopened. I don’t know what the takeaway is here, but Disney World is mainly an outdoor activity. Recall that there was no outbreak associated with Disney World back in the spring either; the park was open until March 15, and thousands of workers and visitors streamed through the park even as the New York Times, among others, sounded the warning bell.
President Trump continues to show no symptoms of COVID-19 and now appears to have antibodies for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, his doctor said Wednesday.
“The president this morning says ‘I feel great!’ His physical exam and vital signs, including oxygen saturation and respiratory rate, all remain stable and in normal range,” physician to the president Dr. Sean Conley said in a memo released by the White House.
“He’s now been fever-free for more than 4 days, symptom-free for over 24 hours, and has not needed nor received any supplemental oxygen since initial hospitalization,” he added.
Conley also revealed that the president’s lab work from Monday showed “detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies.”
It’s unclear if antibodies make you immune to the coronavirus but they may help to ward off future occurrences of infection, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.
At a press conference before his patient’s release from the hospital on Monday, Conley told reporters he was very pleased with the commander-in-chief’s recovery, but warned he was not out of the woods yet.
Trump, 74, has been active on Twitter since returning home, telling followers he’s looking forward to returning to the campaign trail and debating Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Miami on Oct. 15.
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Let’s add to the collection today by perusing an interesting–but frustrating –article in the New York Times about Venezuela’s near-decimated oil industry.
Authored by Sheyla Urdaneta, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Isayen Herrera, it provides a thorough description of how the energy sector in oil-rich Venezuela has collapsed.
For the first time in a century, there are no rigs searching for oil in Venezuela. Wells that once tapped the world’s largest crude reserves are abandoned… Refineries that once processed oil for export are rusting hulks… Fuel shortages have brought the country to a standstill.
At gas stations, lines go on for miles. …The country that a decade ago was the largest producer in Latin America, earning about $90 billion a year from oil exports, is expected to net about $2.3 billion by this year’s end… More than five million Venezuelans, or one in six residents, have fled the country since 2015, creating one of the world’s greatest refugee crises, according to the United Nations. The country now has the highest poverty rate in Latin America, overtaking Haiti.
But here’s what shocked me. The article never once mentions socialism. Or statism. Or leftist economic policy.
Instead, there is one allusion to “mismanagement” and one sentence that refers to government policy.
…years of gross mismanagement… Hugo Chávez, appeared on the national stage in the 1990s promising a revolution that would put Venezuela’s oil to work for its poor majority, he captivated the nation.
…Mr. Chávez commandeered the country’s respected state oil company for his radical development program. He fired nearly 20,000 oil professionals, nationalized foreign-owned oil assets and allowed allies to plunder the oil revenues.
Almost 1800 words in the article, yet virtually no discussion of how maybe, just maybe, Venezuela’s hard shift to the left may have contributed to the collapse of the country’s major industry.
This is journalistic malpractice. Sort of like writing about 2020 and not mentioning coronavirus or writing about 1944 and not mentioning World War II.
In a column for USA Today, Daniel di Martino writes about the awful consequences of his nation’s drift to socialism.
All my life, I lived under socialism in Venezuela until I left and came to the United States as a student in 2016. Because the regime in charge imposed price controls and nationalized the most important private industries, production plummeted. No wonder I had to wait hours in lines to buy simple products such as toothpaste or flour.
…My family and I suffered from blackouts and lack of water. The regime nationalized electricity in 2007 in an effort to make electricity “free.” Unsurprisingly, this resulted in underinvestment in the electrical grid. By 2016, my home lost power roughly once a week. …The real reason my family went without water and electricity was the socialist economy instituted by dictators Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
The welfare programs, many minimum-wage hikes and nationalizations implemented by their regimes resulted in a colossal government deficit that the central bank covered by simply printing more money — leading to rampant inflation. …I watched what was once one of the richest countries in Latin America gradually fall apart under the weight of big government.
And he issues a warning about what could happen to the United States.
…neither Medicare for All nor a wealth tax alone would turn the United States into Venezuela overnight. No single radical proposal would do that. However, if all or most of these measures are implemented, they could have the same catastrophic consequences for the American people that they had for Venezuela.
The good news, so to speak, is that it would take many decades of bad policy to turn the US. into an economic basket case. There’s even a somewhat famous quote from Adam Smith (“there is a great deal of ruin in a nation“) about the ability of a country to survive and withstand lots of bad public policy.
But that doesn’t mean it would be a good idea to see how quickly the US could become Venezuela. As I pointed out when writing about Argentina, it’s possible for a rich country to tax, spend, and regulate itself into economic crisis.
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Experts say there’s another good reason to get your flu vaccine this year.
Top virologist Dr. Robert Gallo says that if the vaccine contains a live virus, there is a chance it may offer some protection against COVID-19. Gallo, who is chairman of the Global Virus Network, says that live, attenuated vaccines, which means the actual pathogen is still living but considerably weakened, appear to offer protection against other illnesses.
According to NPR, an example is the tuberculosis vaccine called bacilli Calmette-Guerin, or BCG, that contains a weakened strain of TB from bovines. Scientists found that it not only protected children against the disease, but appeared to reduce all over mortality rate by boosting the immune system. A similar pattern was observed in the measles and oral polio vaccines.
Recent research reveals that people who have received vaccinations for other diseases seem to be less affected by the virus. Even if they catch the virus, their symptoms appear to be milder.
According to CNN, these factors may account for the reasons some individuals get sicker than others. Dr. Andrew Badley, a professor of infectious disease at the Mayo Clinic and leader of its COVID-19 research task force, said that people who had a variety of vaccines such as influenza, pneumococcus, and others, appear to have a lower risk of getting COVID-19.
It is called immune training, he said:
“A good analogy is to think of your immune system as a muscle. The more you exercise the muscle, the stronger it will become if you need it.”
Currently scientists from around the world are testing whether the BCG or live polio vaccine can offer some protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Gallo, who was one of the scientists who discovered HIV, says there is no time like the present to get vaccinated against the flu. The nasal spray called FluMist is the vaccine that contains live, attenuated flu viruses, according to CNN. The second form of vaccine, the flu shot, contains an inactivated form of the virus.
“You watch,” Gallo says. “People who get the live flu vaccine will also be protected against the COVID-19. That’s the hypothesis.”
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