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Current as of July 2, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.

COVID-19 Testing Sites - Florida

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The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity is now giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program


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To date, more than 28 million COVID19 tests have been performed nationwide. Dr. Dean Watson, VP and Chief Integration Officer at TMH, is sharing more on the increase in testing, the importance of understanding hospitalization & mortality rates and why it's crucial to continue wearing masks.

The prevalence of immunity to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 may be much higher than previous research suggests according to an intriguing new study by researchers associated with Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In addition, a new German study by researchers associated with the University Hospital Tübingen in Germany reports that people who have been previously infected with versions of the coronavirus that cause the common cold also have some immunity to the COVID-19 virus. If these reports stand up to further scrutiny, it would be very good news because they suggest that the pandemic could be over sooner and ultimately be less lethal than feared.

First, a few caveats: Both studies are based on small sample sizes and neither have yet been vetted by peer review.

In the Swedish study, researchers not only checked 200 participants for the presence of immunological proteins called antibodies produced in response to COVID-19 infections, but also for T-cells which are another virus-fighting component of the immune system. Detecting and evaluating T-cells is a bit trickier than measuring antibodies.

The Karolinska researchers, according to the accompanying press release, "performed immunological analyses of samples from over 200 people, many of whom had mild or no symptoms of COVID-19." The study tested COVID-19 patients, exposed asymptomatic family members, healthy blood donors who gave blood during 2020, and a 2019 donor control group.

"One interesting observation was that it wasn't just individuals with verified COVID-19 who showed T-cell immunity but also many of their exposed asymptomatic family members," said Karolinska researcher Soo Aleman. "Moreover, roughly 30 per cent of the blood donors who'd given blood in May 2020 had COVID-19-specific T cells, a figure that's much higher than previous antibody tests have shown."

"Our results indicate that roughly twice as many people have developed T-cell immunity compared with those who we can detect antibodies in," noted Karolinska Center for Infectious Medicine researcher Marcus Buggert.

Study co-author Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren told The Telegraph that if the study's findings are replicated, they would apply to any country. London, for instance, might have about 30 percent immunity and New York above 40 percent. If so, some parts of the U.S. are much closer to herd immunity than population-wide antibody testing currently suggests.

Herd immunity is the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease that results if a sufficiently high proportion of a population is immune to the illness. Some people are still susceptible, but they are surrounded by immune individuals who serve as a barrier, preventing the microbes from reaching them. Epidemiologists typically estimate that the COVID-19 threshold for herd immunity is around 60 to 70 percent.

Still the Swedish researchers caution, "It remains to be determined if a robust memory T cell response in the absence of detectable circulating antibodies can protect against [the virus]."


To this point, 71 percent more Americans have died in New York nursing homes than have died in the entire state of Florida, which not only has a larger population but a population that skews older. To this point, New York’s death rate has been ten times larger than Florida’s. So, naturally, liberals are busy concocting a narrative that holds that the failures of the American response to coronavirus have been the fault of Trumpian nihilists in the Red States.

The “toxic imbecility” of Republicans is getting people killed, writes Max Boot. “Trumpism, not polarization, drives America’s disastrous coronavirus politics” says Ezra Klein. Some pundits who push this myth, Paul Krugman in particular, had even had the temerity to suggest that the country look to New York State for advice.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but today it’s clear that NYC has been the key spreader of the infection nationally, and clear, too, that NYC was unable to flatten the curve.

Deaths per million:

New Jersey: 1,708.7

New York: 1,651.6

Connecticut: 1,212.2

Georgia: 264.2

Florida: 163.2

Texas: 86.1

There are numerous factors beyond our control that created this reality — perhaps the weather, or the population density, or centralized nature of the city, or whatever else researchers will uncover one day. There’s a reason why San Francisco recorded fewer than 50 coronavirus deaths and New York City has about 18,000, and it’s probably not the ideology of its mayors. But that works both ways around. There is simply no way that an open-minded person can arrive at the conclusion that red states bear some unique responsibility for this tragedy.

Let’s remember that initial national lockdown efforts were intended to flatten the curve so that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed with COVID cases, not to shutter the economy in perpetuity (or until a Democrat wins the White House) to ensure that no one gets sick anymore. Other than the New York area, which is led by a governor who made perhaps the single most deadly policy mistake in the entire crisis, this goal has largely been achieved. In the United States, the death rate (the stat that matters more than any other) has been as low, or lower, than most major European nations:

Deaths per million:

Belgium: 854.0

UK: 657.7

Spain: 606.9

Italy: 575.3

Sweden: 523.7

France: 445.5

U.S.: 397.8

(All the foreign countries above, incidentally, have some form of socialized health-care system, which I’m constantly being assured by liberals would have mitigated the effects of coronavirus.)

Most nations that have done better than the United States in this regard (sans Germany) are far smaller, and have an easier time containing spread by shutting down borders; or are more authoritarian, with the kind of pliant populations and governments that some U.S. pundits seem to desire.

There was always going to be an accompanying spike with more testing and reopening, and states need to calibrate their reactions as the facts on the ground change. But, to borrow a phrase, this is primarily a question of science. The crude partisan tale we keep hearing regarding red states, on the other hand, is little more than a fiction.


A coronavirus vaccine candidate from pharmaceutical company Pfizer has shown potential in healthy volunteers. Stocks jumped on the announcement Wednesday.

The experimental vaccine developed by Pfizer and the biotech firm BioNTech produced promising results in early-stage human trials, in which 45 volunteers were given doses of the vaccine. Each participant received 10, 30, or 100 microgram doses of the vaccine or a placebo.

Overall, the vaccine was shown to be safe when given to healthy volunteers, but it also caused fever and other mild side effects, especially at higher doses. Volunteers who took the lower doses of the vaccine each got a second injection and had higher antibody levels than patients who just got a single 100-milligram-dose.


U.S. employers added a substantial 4.8 million jobs in June, and the unemployment rate fell to 11.1%, as the job market improved for a second straight month yet still remained far short of regaining the colossal losses it suffered this spring.

The nation has now recovered roughly one-third of the 22 million jobs it lost to the pandemic recession. And with confirmed coronavirus cases spiking across the Sun Belt states, a range of evidence suggests that a job market recovery may be stalling. In those states and elsewhere, some restaurants, bars and other retailers that had re-opened are being forced to close again.

The re-closings are keeping layoffs elevated: The number of Americans who sought unemployment benefits barely fell last week to 1.47 million. Though that weekly figure has declined steadily since peaking in late March, it’s still more than double the pre-pandemic peak set in 1982. And the total number of people receiving jobless aid remains at a sizable 19 million.

California has re-closed bars, theaters and indoor restaurant dining across most of the state. Florida has also re-closed bars and beaches. Texas has reversed some of its efforts to reopen its economy. New York has paused its plans to allow indoor dining.

Credit and debit card data tracked by JPMorgan Chase show that consumers reduced their spending last week after having increased it steadily in late April and May. The reversal has occurred both in states that have reported surges in COVID-19 and in less affected states, said Jesse Edgerton, an economist at J.P. Morgan.


Whenever I go back home to Missouri, family and friends ask me, “What do you like most about New York?” The list is lengthy, I reply. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral is up there, of course, and nothing beats that magical feel of Manhattan around Christmastime. But near the top would be the men and women of the New York Police Department.

I chat with them on their beat. I have a coffee with them in the kitchen of my home behind the cathedral. I celebrate their weddings, baptize their kids and show up at their events. And yes, I visit them in the ICU, and attend their wakes and funerals when they’re wounded or killed in the line of duty, which happens more often than I care to recall.

Much too frequently of late, I have grieved with the family of an officer who took his or her own life.

Our valiant police officers have one of the most perilous, stressful duties around, and from what I have seen in my nearly dozen years here, they do it with care, compassion and competence.

Now we have added to their load with continual, at times exaggerated, rash and inaccurate criticism, combined with rocks, Molotov cocktails and taunts.

Do police forces deserve criticism sometimes? You bet they do. The vicious killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd by a policeman, with his partners idly watching, reminds us in a nauseating way that for some cops, black lives do not matter. The most stinging rebuke of that outrage in Minneapolis that I hear comes from — guess who? The cops I chat with on the sidewalks of New York.

They, and their department, realize criticism is called for. When it comes, they listen and undertake reform. Ongoing examination of procedures, enhanced training in “de-escalation,” more intense screening of admissions, bodycams and reviews, community outreach and a successful effort at diversity in recent decades (my friend Rabbi Joseph Potasnik likes to observe, “The majority is the minorities in the NYPD”): These reforms are all in effect in the NYPD.

The men and women of the department realize they are far from perfect. But we know that while bad apples there indeed may be, they are very rare. As I mentioned to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea during a recent meeting, this point particularly resonates with me, as I have seen the overwhelming majority of good, faithful priests tarred by the heinous actions of a very few.

Not long after I arrived here, I was walking down the center aisle of the cathedral after Sunday Mass. From out of the congregation jumped a man holding an object in his hand. What he was clutching I did not know, but I have to admit, I feared it to be a pistol. Apparently, the officer on duty that morning did, too. He lunged not at the man, but at me, shielding me from the rushing congregant. Then we both saw the man was holding a cross, which he asked me to bless.

What moved me was the police officer’s spontaneous instinct to protect me, literally “to take a bullet for me.” The NYPD would do that for any of us, members of the community they swear to serve and protect.

A few years ago, I did the funeral of a police officer shot on duty. He had his gun pulled and aimed at the perpetrator who had already shot others and could easily have fired his weapon. But he didn’t pull the trigger. Why? The culprit was holding a baby he had grabbed. The cop lost his life lest he endanger that of another.

As Rep. Peter King eloquently remarked on the floor of the House last week, our racial minorities in the tense and poor areas of the city especially need the police. In a recent meeting with community activists, one black leader reminded us, “Don’t give me this ‘get-rid-of-the-cops’ rant! You on Madison Avenue or Park Avenue might not need the police. We up in The Bronx sure do!”

One of the tumors on our beloved nation, past and present, is that we often target African-Americans, profile them, caricature them, blame them and suspect them as the cause of all evil and woe in society. That is raw injustice. But for God’s sake, let’s not now, in a similar way, stereotype the NYPD.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan is the archbishop of New York.


Teachers unions know how to play hardball. Last year saw teachers strike across the country, from Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif., to Denver and West Virginia. This year, amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaders of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have signaled that they would consider strikes if schools reopen without sufficient safety protections.

The NEA’s and AFT’s safety concerns are reasonable. But looming behind the debate is a coming spike in the cost of unfunded pension obligations

As we approach this Fourth of July, the United States is consumed by reckless violence, nihilistic silencing, and a systematic assault on the nation’s cultural and political patrimony. The voices of sanity are few, and civic courage is in short supply. The exemplars of such courage in the Anglo-American tradition — Washington, Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill — are under assault from angry extremists who topple statues with impunity and demand absolute conformity. Government at every level appears impotent as indignant fanatics rule the streets. We have arrived at the unthinkable: “America’s Jacobin moment,” as an editorial in the Wall Street Journal aptly put it. What has happened to our republic?

Our talking heads, the so-called “chattering classes,” pretend that this eruption of insanity has something to do with the quest for racial justice. That could not be further from the truth. Black Lives Matter — the movement, not the slogan — is in fact a racialist and ideological organization that denies common humanity and a morality applicable to all human beings. Professed enemies of decency and restraint, these Maoists and para-Marxists demonize all white people and anyone of any race or religion who challenges their bizarre and fanatical worldview, as well as the police (whose immediate abolition they demand). Of course, they do not believe that all black lives matter: Those black people, including children, cut down by urban violence in Chicago or Baltimore every weekend, or aborted at higher numbers than they are born in New York City, don’t pass ideological muster. Black lives matter, of course, because all lives matter, but that elementary truth is now verboten. All races are equal, but in BLM’s universe, some are more equal than others. This is a recipe for hatred and perpetual social conflict. 

To affirm the moral law, the natural law, the spirit of the Ten Commandments, the true ground of all human dignity, is now said to be an indelible mark of racism. The mob dictates, and subservient elites shamelessly comply. We are witnessing nothing less than a Cultural Revolution marked by voluntary servitude or self-enslavement. American democracy risks committing suicide. Things are just that stark. And our pusillanimous cultural elites risk plunging us off the cliff like the “Gadarene swine” described in Scripture, but with the demons in charge rather than exorcised.

True democracy presupposes mutual accountability and mutual respect. Our greatest and most noble president, Abraham Lincoln, “loathed slavery,” as Frederick Douglass, the greatest black American of the 19th century, rightly said. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” Lincoln wrote in a note to himself in August 1858. This, he said, “expresses my idea of democracy.” And in his Gettysburg Address of November 1863, he called for a “new birth of freedom” that would bring black Americans fully into the American civic community. Lincoln knew that proud black men had spilled their blood for the Union and liberty and that Americans owed them honor and due respect for their sacrifices on behalf of the republic. As Douglass said in his dedication to the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., in April 1876 — a statue dedicated by former slaves in memory of Lincoln — one must show gratitude and appreciation to those “loyal, brave, and patriotic” black soldiers who “fell in defense of the Union and liberty.” Both they and Lincoln died at the service of a republic worthy of free men and women, one where citizens shared in rule and were neither masters nor slaves. We should be proud of that shared civic legacy, that mutual struggle for liberty and human dignity.  

But now even the Freedmen’s Monument is threatened by a mob of angry thugs. These “Bourgeois Bolsheviks,” as The American Conservative recently described them, despise the mutual accountability and respect for law that undergirds true liberty and equality. They mock the greatness of Lincoln and Douglass. They are defined by ignorance, ingratitude, and envy. Their ignoble “passion for equality,” as Tocqueville called it, is a grotesque perversion of the noble moral and civic equality that underlies the American proposition. This desire to tear down, to destroy and repudiate the patrimony of our fathers, is incompatible with civilized existence.


It’s big news when somebody prominent apologizes for being badly wrong on a major public matter, promises to do better going forward and urges others to do the same, right? Unless the person commits heresy like, say, Michael Shellenberger.

In case you missed it, and they did their best to make sure you did, Shellenberger is an excruciatingly woke environmentalist and progressive. By his own account “At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.”

His environmentalist credentials are equally solid beginning with raising money for Rainforest Action Network at 16. But in cancel culture, all that is solid melts into air … with a little help from a match. Including Shellenberger’s remarkable cri de coeur in Forbes starting “On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”

Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Sorry. Did I say “in Forbes?” Alas, if you go there now you get a terse “This page is no longer active. We regret any inconvenience.” In the fast-vanishing spirit of fair play, I contacted Forbes to see if it was just a technical glitch. Nyet, tovarisch.

Their initial wary response asked “the angle of your column” and suggested “a brief call for us to connect.” I retorted that “the ‘angle’ of my column has no bearing on the reasons for your decision” and asked bluntly “Was it because you discovered a factual error? Because of protests from subscribers? Because of protests from within the organization? Because something in it struck you as legally problematic? It’s a pretty major decision. I assume someone fairly senior in the organization took it, and that this person knows why. Please ask them, and tell me what they said.”


Last week, yet another mob of nearly all-white leftist protesters terrorized their town — in this case, Madison, Wisconsin. They beat up a 60-year-old Democratic state senator and beheaded the statue of a fervent abolitionist who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

All we can say is, thank you. This incident helps illustrate what the current iconoclast movement is really all about.

As the professional Left continues to commit, and its institutional apologists to excuse, these convulsions of nationwide violence and vandalism, it must be noted that such historically ignorant misfires keep occurring again and again — too often to be a coincidence.

In Boston, it was emancipator Abraham Lincoln’s statue that has been repeatedly vandalized. In Philadelphia, it was abolitionist Matthias Baldwin. In San Francisco, it was President Ulysses Grant, who put down the Confederacy's rebellion. In Washington, D.C., George Washington’s statue was pulled down on the campus of George Washington University.

In another part of Washington, yet another mostly white mob of professional protesters showed up in Lincoln Park with the intention of tearing down a memorial to emancipation that Frederick Douglass himself had dedicated in a magnificent speech, which was mostly financed by freed slaves. A black woman who spoke up to object — “Are you trying to divide us or bring us together? Because it seems like you are abusing this situation” — was jeered until she left.

To be perfectly clear, this fit of iconoclasm is not in any way about cautiously discriminating which figures will be honored by local communities. It is not about removing ugly memories created by memorials to the Confederacy. Rather, it is about vandalizing and erasing this nation’s history (and other nations’ histories as well — it takes a special kind of stupid to deface Charles de Gaulle’s likeness, calling him a “slaver”).
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