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 Sept. 15, 2020, at 8:00 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.
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
|
|
Current Statistics
-
Fatality rate in Florida - 1.9%
- Covid fatality rate in FL by age group:
-
15-24 years old - .03%
-
25-34 years old - .07%
-
35-44 years old - .21%
-
45-54 years old - .49%
-
55-64 years old - 1.6%
-
65-74 years old - 5.2%
-
75 and up - 16.8%
-
Seasonal influenza mortality rate in the US (2017 CDC) 18-49 yo - .02%
-
Median age of new Covid cases - 37 years old
-
Emergency department visits w/ COVID-like illness - 17% decrease
-
ICU beds available in Florida - 25%
-
Hospital beds available in Florida - 28%
|
|
Vaccine Tracking
LAST UPDATED: SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 8:26 AM PST
211
vaccines are in development.
31
are now in clinical testing.
|
|
The idea that America has incurred larger losses from COVID than any other nation has been widely repeated, but it’s not true. In reality, the United States has incurred smaller COVID losses than many other countries often cast as role models, once the total cost of the disease — in both lost lives and economic activity — is correctly measured and taken into account. A truly scientific approach to evaluating COVID policy relies on quantification of the tradeoffs involved, as opposed to only considering health losses.
The issue is how to measure the quantitative magnitudes of two separate strands of losses, the cost of disease prevention and the cost of the disease itself, to guide policy on minimizing the total impact. Economists routinely quantify and assess tradeoffs between health and other valuable activities to determine overall costs they impose. Doing so does not trivialize human life but acknowledges — as all of us must — that saving lives at any cost is not practical nor desirable.
Consider a somewhat extreme hypothetical example. Over 40,000 people die on U.S. roads each year, yet we don’t shut down highways. Instead of closing them — and losing all the economic benefits they provide — the government manages but does not eliminate the risks from bad drivers by regulating speed limits, enforcing DUI laws, and requiring people to have licenses to drive. Put differently, closing roads would entail a loss from prevention that would be higher than the value of the lives saved.
Tradeoffs obviously play a role in setting health-related policies. Yet some epidemiologists ignore tradeoffs when pushing for their preferred COVID prevention. They only measure one type of loss in terms of health. However, these medical scientists still drive to work like everyone else, even though their mortality would be lower if they did not. This shows how, in every other aspect of life, common sense balances the costs of prevention against its benefits in terms of lower mortality. But for COVID policy decisions, in many locales, the so-called scientists adhere to unscientific economic claims about the quantitative tradeoffs involved.
Economic science has developed standardized measures for quantifying the economic value of health losses. These conventional valuation metrics are routinely used by governments around the globe to evaluate health-related investments and help governments decide, for example, whether a guardrail is a cost-effective way to reduce traffic fatalities. Using these metrics, we calculated (in the figure below) the total COVID losses through June 2020 for various Western democracies, as a share of their pre-COVID GDP in the fourth quarter of 2019.
These estimates include both the losses from reduced economic activity (in blue) and the loss of lives (in orange), quantified in dollars using these standard methods. For example, the United States experienced an approximate 11 percent reduction in GDP for the first half of 2020. Adding the value of the roughly 120,000 lives lost over the same period, which according to standard metrics represents about 11 percent of GDP, brings the total loss to 22 percent of GDP.
|
|
In calculating these losses, we used the latest available GDP data, first and second quarter of 2020, and the lives lost during that period. This actually biases the calculations against the United States, since larger and denser populations naturally tend to not only have more spread, but also larger per capita infection rates.
The relatively low total loss of the United States partly stems from allowing the economy to function more freely than some other countries. The bottom line is that the United States has managed to keep the total loss inflicted by COVID lower than, or similar to, that of many other European countries often touted as role models.
Although later GDP data are not available, existing forecasts for the rest of 2020 also imply that the U.S. will look even better than this once the second-half numbers come in. Euro-area GDP is forecast to fall 8.3 percent over all of 2020, compared with 4.9 percent in the U.S. When combined with end-of-year mortality forecasts from Washington University’s IHME, these forecasts imply a total loss of 13.9 percent of 2019 GDP for 2020 in the U.S. compared with 14.7 percent in the Euro area.
With most diseases, preventive behavior is very costly. That’s why there’s such a high prevalence of many of them, such as obesity or influenza. If preventive behavior were cheap compared to its negative impact, we would see less of the disease, as is the case for, say, polio.
Therefore, reducing disease-related losses through R&D and innovation is generally cheaper than more costly behavioral changes, such as shutting down schools or closing non-essential businesses. It is estimated that COVID has caused a total loss of about $3 trillion as of early September in the United States, most of it economic.
Given this staggering cost, a few billion extra dollars for R&D into therapeutics and vaccines is very cheap if successful, relative to other more costly behavioral forms of prevention induced by cutting economic activity.
Therefore, measuring the total loss from COVID correctly, President Trump’s overall strategy of minimizing total losses by balancing the costs of preventive measures against health losses seems prudent. In addition, the president’s efforts to reduce future total losses globally by investing heavily in cheaper forms of prevention such as better treatments and faster vaccine development — rather than focusing on economically costly shutdowns — seems desirable.
Many of the president’s critics and other so-called experts ignore the science that has been developed to analyze the magnitudes of the policy tradeoffs between worthwhile competing goals. If they took a more holistic view — and relied on the economic science that allows us to quantify these tradeoffs — they’d see that when correctly measured, countries differ less in the total loss inflicted by COVID when prevention and health losses are negatively related. The United States is performing better than many of its purported role models, especially by reducing the global loss of the disease through innovation.
The chief executive of Pfizer Inc. said Sunday that the pharmaceutical giant should know if its experimental COVID-19 vaccine works by the end of October — and if approved, it could be distributed in the U.S. by the end of the year.
In an interview Sunday with CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” CEO Albert Bourla said there is a “good chance” of getting key data from late-stage trials to the Food and Drug Administration by the end of October, and that the company is already producing the vaccine, just in case.
“We started already manufacturing and we have already manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses, so just in case we have a good study readout, conclusive and FDA, plus the advisory committee feels comfortable, that we will be ready,” Bourla said.
He said Pfizer PFE, +1.17%, which is teaming with German drugmaker BioNTech BNTX, +6.42% on the coronavirus vaccine’s development, will absorb a financial hit if the vaccine fails, but was adamant about not taking government funding to keep the process apolitical.
Bourla said Pfizer has already invested about $1.5 billion into the vaccine effort. “At the end of the day, it’s only money. But that will not break the company, although it’s going to be painful,’” he said, on the possibility that the vaccine does not prove to be effective.
|
|
For more evidence that the labor market recovery is continuing, consider the Labor Department’s JOLTS report last week showing the U.S. had 6.6 million job openings in July—about as many as in December of last year. Many businesses are eager to hire, if they could find workers.
Job openings increased by 617,000 in July while the number of “quits” climbed by 344,000. The quits rate generally increases as the economy improves and workers feel more confident. Notably, 1.2 million more workers quit in July than were laid off.
Despite the recent raft of brick-and-mortar store bankruptcies, there were more quits in retail in July than there were layoffs. One reason may be that online retailers, warehouses and home-improvement stores like Home Depot have been on a hiring binge. Home-improvement stores have added 80,000 jobs, and general merchandise stores 199,000 since February—and many have increased pay.
This could explain why hourly average earnings for retail workers have risen at an astounding annual rate of 10% since February. Hourly earnings initially dipped in May and June as employers rehired lower-paying workers, but wages shot up in July and August.
While there are still about 2.5 unemployed workers for each job opening, that’s the same ratio as in January 2014, five years after the 2008-2009 recession. Remarkably, the job openings rate—i.e., job openings as a share of all filled and vacant positions—in retail, food and accommodation, and construction in July was roughly the same as last fall.
This is more evidence that the $600 per week in federal enhanced jobless benefits, which expired at the end of July, reduced the incentive to work. Uber’s chief financial officer last week said the expiration “has been a tailwind for driver growth.” President Trump has extended the benefit at $300, which is less of a disincentive but means many workers still earn more by not working.
A labor shortage could become a stronger economic headwind going forward, especially in the South and Mountain West states that are recovering faster. The National Federation of Independent Business survey last week reported that a third of small businesses had unfilled job openings and their most cited problem was “quality of labor.” Employers have good gigs available, if workers want them.
|
|
Another new test for COVID-19 was recently authorized — and this one could be a game-changer.
The Abbot Diagnostics BinaxNOW antigen test is a new point-of-care test that reportedly costs only $5 to administer, delivers results in as little as 15 minutes, and requires no laboratory equipment to perform.
That means it can be used in clinics far from commercial labs or without relying on a nearby hospital lab.
That last factor is key. There are other quick COVID-19 tests on the market, but they have all required lab equipment that can be expensive to maintain and operate, and costs can be prohibitive in places that need tests most.
This kind of test is reminiscent of rapid flu tests that are ubiquitous in clinics. They’ll give providers tremendous flexibility in testing for the disease in not just clinics, but with trained and licensed medical professionals, in schools, workplaces, camps, or any other number of places.
With other kinds of tests taking sometimes days to produce results, thanks to supply chain bottlenecks in parts of the country, innovations like this may be an important part of ensuring everyone who needs a test can get one — fast.
So what’s new about this test? Most of the current tests detect viral RNA, the genetic material of SARS-CoV-2. This is a very accurate way of detecting the virus, but it requires lab equipment to break apart the virus and amplify the amount of genetic material to high enough levels for detection. The BinaxNOW test detects antigens — proteins unique to the virus that are usually detectable whenever there is an active infection.
There are a small number of other tests on the market that also detect viral antigens rather than viral RNA. But like the RNA tests, they also require using proprietary equipment to read the results. This one only requires the test kit, which can be stored at room temperature, and a nasal swab that can be found in every clinic or medical facility.
Because this test is different from other COVID-19 tests, its production doesn’t require many of the extra supplies to needed to make the test work — reagents or components — that are in high demand for the RNA-based tests. High demand for those test components have been a major cause of slow testing result turnaround times.
Abbott says it intends to produce 50 million tests per month starting in October. That’s far more than the number tested in July, when we were breaking new testing records on a daily basis with approximately 23 million tests recorded.
The first issue is whether the test can be used at all by a clinic. While the technology is different (antigen versus RNA), they both require nasal swabs to collect a sample. Unfortunately, nasal swabs have frequently been in short supply in areas trying to conduct large numbers of tests.
The other issue is that, while this test allows an outlying clinic to easily test patients for COVID-19, no doctor’s office will schedule a patient with a suspected case of COVID-19 to walk into the waiting room to be tested. As this disease is so infectious — approximately 4 times more infectious than H1N1 influenza — clinics will almost certainly require special protocols for COVID-19 testing. If a clinic is unable to accommodate suspected cases of COVID-19, they’ll likely direct patients to local health department resources that are more likely to use RNA based tests that need to be sent to commercial labs.
But those who use these tests, and future ones like it, now have the option to employ it in ways to best suit their needs. Quick point-of-care tests, unbound by complex equipment, may become part of what the testing regime looks like when society shifts to catching new cases before outbreaks can occur. In the meantime, if Abbott is able to meet its production goals, it could greatly alleviate backlogs in testing.
The important thing is that this kind of innovation continues to happen. The Trump administration’s effort to clear out red tape is paying off. It’s leading to private industry doing what it does best – figuring out how to help us beat the pandemic through new tests and treatments.
Whether the BinaxNOW test is a gamechanger or not remains to be seen, but the increasing number and variety of available tests is a welcome development working to wipe out COVID-19 in America.
|
|
The two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies shot Saturday night are out of surgery and are expected to survive.
The Los Angeles Times reports that both deputies are “recovering,” following surgery after the ambush attack.
L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva described the wounded deputies as a “31-year-old mother of a 6-year-old boy and… a 24-year-old man.” He said the fact that both are expected to survive is a “double miracle.”
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Headquarters tweeted video of the attack. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Headquarters has subsequently tweeted a special bulletin announcing a $100,000 reward for information “lead to the arrest and conviction” of the attacker.
California has every gun control the Democrats are pushing at the federal level and then some. The state has universal background checks, gun registration requirements, a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, a requirement that would-be gun purchases first pass a gun safety test with the state, an “assault weapons” ban, a red flag law, a “good cause” requirement for concealed carry permit issuance, a ban on campus carry, a ban on K-12 teachers being armed to shoot back in case classrooms are attacked, a limit on the number of guns law-abiding citizens can buy each month, background checks for ammunition sales and a requirement that all ammunition sales take place through state-approved vendors.
No one other than the shooter is responsible for the gunfire ambush Saturday of two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies as they sat in their patrol car. But the same can’t be said for the protesters who blocked the entrance to the hospital where the two are being treated, and chanted “we hope they die.” The latter is a cultural poison nurtured by the left-wing anti-police movement sweeping the country.
The two deputies were “ambushed by a gunman in a cowardly fashion” in the Compton neighborhood, said Sheriff Alex Villaneuva at a press conference. The deputies hadn’t been identified by name as we write this, but press reports say one is a 31-year-old mother and the other a 24-year-old man. Both have been with the department a little more than a year.
Police haven’t identified a suspect, but the randomness of the ambush suggests someone looking for any available police target. We’ve seen this before when anti-police fever is hot. A gunman shot and killed two officers in their car in New York in 2014 following the death of black suspects being arrested in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.
The protests are worse this year following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the anti-police violence is more widespread. An officer was stabbed in the neck in Flatbush in New York City in an ambush in June. The officer survived.
Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti called the chants and protests at the hospital “unacceptable” and “abhorrent,” but he and other Democrats need to do more to condemn and ostracize these protesters. Democrats may fear the wrath of Black Lives Matter, but the backlash elsewhere in America will be far greater if pleasure at cop killing becomes common on the left.
Policing reform is impossible amid a war on police. Mr. Garcetti and other mayors should abandon their cuts to law-enforcement budgets and express regular solidarity for cops on the beat. Without such a signal, police will continue to retreat from enforcing the law in crime-ridden neighborhoods, and those who suffer most will be the law-abiding in the likes of Compton and Flatbush.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
