‘Exponential growth.’ Despite testing slowdown, Florida COVID cases hit all-time high

With Florida reporting the highest number of new COVID-19 cases in a single day on Wednesday, public health experts say the state could be witnessing exponential growth of the spread of the virus.

The alarming spike of new cases and the rising rate of positive tests led three states in the Northeast to order mandatory 14-day quarantine for travelers from Florida while new accusations of data manipulation by the Florida Department of Health gained traction on social media and cable TV news.

Florida added 5,508 cases on Wednesday, a record high. Of the nearly 110,000 COVID-19 cases confirmed since March, nearly 30% or more than 31,680 cases have been reported in the last 10 days. And while cases surge in Miami-Dade and statewide, testing volume has flat-lined in Florida, which ranks 29th among all 50 states in testing per 100,000 people, according to a Johns Hopkins University analysis of data collected by the COVID Tracking Project.

In Miami-Dade, county officials reported 957 new cases Wednesday, the highest single day total in two weeks, while the average of new tests per day has ticked down over the same period.

Stephen Kissler, an immunology and infectious disease expert with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the surge of new cases signals that the state is entering a new phase in the pandemic. And it looks a lot like the first phase.

“Cases are spiking, both the number of positive tests and the percent of positive tests,” Kissler said, “and it looks like we’re entering a second exponential phase there, and that’s what’s really concerning.”

When the number of cases grows and testing does not expand, “clearly that is because of increased disease transmission,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and public health expert with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Nuzzo said Florida’s spike in cases is likely due to more people returning to work and frequenting businesses after many months away.

“It sounds like what’s happening now in many states is that when people are leaving their houses, it’s the younger, working populations that are getting infected,” she said.

Testing debate

Though public health experts said testing had flat-lined or even slowed in Florida, state officials rejected that premise, pointing instead to two-week averages to claim that testing continues to increase.

“The state is continuing to increase COVID-19 testing daily,” said Jason Mahon, a spokesman for the Department of Emergency Management, in a statement.

Mahon added that the state has opened six new testing locations since May 29 and has expanded capacity at many state-supported testing sites, including in Orange County, where he said that testing capacity doubled from 1,000 tests per day to 2,000.

But demand for testing has waned as many people appeared to lose interest in COVID-19 and the state moved forward with reopening, perhaps leading some to let down their guard and ignore social distancing and other prevention measures.

“We all agree that people were getting more lax, and it’s why we are where we are now,” said Miami-Dade Deputy Mayor Jennifer Moon.

Testing in the county has trended downward over the last two weeks despite ample capacity to provide tests, though Moon said she expects more people will want to be tested in the coming weeks as the disease continues to spread in the community at a high rate.

The two-week average of positive cases out of total tests in Miami-Dade was nearly 14% on Wednesday, well above the county’s goal of maintaining a positive test rate of 10% or less — a development that led county officials to crack down on enforcement of social distancing and mandatory face masks at indoor businesses, such as restaurants and barber shops.

Further claims of data manipulation

As Florida moves forward with a phased reopening plan that Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he will not reverse, the state’s health department continued to face troubling accusations from Rebekah Jones, a data scientist who was fired from the agency for insubordination.

On Wednesday, Jones appeared on CNN and spoke on WLRN-91.3 FM, the National Public Radio station in Miami and the Herald’s news partner, and accused the health department of “deleting deaths” related to COVID and manipulating data to make the state appear safer for Fourth of July weekend.

DeSantis, speaking at a charter school in Hialeah Gardens on Wednesday, dismissed Jones’ claims as “a conspiracy bandwagon.”

But in South Florida, local officials have responded with urgency to the disease’s alarming spread.

In Broward County, officials issued a new emergency order Wednesday that will force businesses to close temporarily and potentially pay a $500 fine if they fail to follow social distancing guidelines and require their customers to wear face coverings.

“We know that social distancing and wearing a face covering works,” Broward Mayor Dale Holness said at a press conference in Fort Lauderdale, where he was joined by the mayors of nine cities in the county.

Miami-Dade takes action, too

In Miami-Dade, local hospitals reported 870 inpatients with COVID-19, the second consecutive day that number reached a record high for the pandemic.

County officials responded with an unprecedented proposal in Miami-Dade’s long history of disaster response: Paying for a “limited number” of hotel rooms to isolate COVID-positive people who can’t afford to quarantine away from their families. Miami-Dade also dispatched “surge teams” to COVID-19 hot spots, such as Miami’s Brownsville and the Homestead area.

County officials said this week that many of the patients with COVID0-19 filling local hospitals are younger and that their illnesses have been less severe, though certainly bad enough for them to be hospitalized. But hospital administrators worry that if the number of new COVID-19 cases continues to rise unimpeded, their facilities could be stressed.

Nuzzo, the Johns Hopkins public health expert, said slowing the spread of COVID-19 in Florida will take a combination of widely available testing, more contact tracing and broad adoption of social distancing and other prevention measures, such as frequent hand washing and wearing masks in public.

The state’s exponential growth in COVID is not “inevitable,” she said. “But clearly if this growth is allowed to proceed without any intervention, any state could find themselves in that situation.”

Miami Herald staff writers Samantha J. Gross, Douglas Hanks and Aaron Leibowitz, and McClatchy DC data reporter Ben Wieder contributed to this report.