Florida’s runaway covid spike hits record high. Governor refuses to mandate masks
The runaway surge of COVID-19 infections engulfing Florida reached unnerving heights on Friday as the state and nation reported the highest single day of new cases for the second time in a record week. With more than half of all states reporting increases in new cases, the White House Coronavirus Task Force, delivering its first briefing in months, renewed calls for Americans to be vigilant.
In Miami-Dade, the county with the most COVID-19 cases and deaths in the state, record numbers of patients with the disease continued to strain local hospitals. The mayor ordered beaches closed for the Fourth of July in response to the crisis, and local health officials warned of yet another contagion re-emerging in the region: West Nile virus, which is spread by mosquitoes.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, speaking at a press conference in Fort Myers, appeared fatigued and combative as he explained why he will not order Floridians to wear face coverings in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 as public health experts have urged.
The Florida Department of Health and DeSantis have advised Floridians to wear face coverings when they cannot maintain a six-foot distance from others, but the governor has refused to make them mandatory as the City of Miami did this week, and other cities across the state have already done, from Central Florida to the Panhandle.
“We’ve advised that’s something that could make an impact,” DeSantis said. “At the same time, to do police and put criminal penalties on that is something that probably would backfire.”
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And though DeSantis’ administration rolled back the state’s phased reopening by suspending alcohol sales at bars statewide on Friday, the governor never mentioned the change until asked by a reporter why the state wasn’t doing more to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Instead, the governor repeated the same message that he and hospital administrators have been hammering since last week: that the average age of Floridians infected with COVID-19 in recent weeks is younger than the mostly elderly population affected in March and April.
The state’s COVID-19 cases began to rise sharply in mid-June after Florida launched the second phase of reopening on June 5, allowing bars, movie theaters and gyms to open at 50 percent capacity. But DeSantis attributed the rise in infections among youth to the anti-police brutality street protests and to young people’s willingness to socialize without the recommended distancing.
“The younger people, you know, if they’re partying at somebody’s house or something, they’re probably not wearing masks,” he said. “I mean, let’s just be honest with that.”
But focusing on the younger age of new COVID-19 cases while Florida sees an explosive growth of infections cannot mask the seriousness of the crisis, public health experts said. The state health department on Friday confirmed 8,942 new cases, nearly doubling the previous record of cases reported in a single day, two days earlier.
“A 9,000 jump in cases is worrisome no matter how you look at it,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and public health expert with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Florida now has confirmed nearly 123,000 COVID-19 cases since March, with nearly a quarter, or more than 29,000, reported in the last seven days. And though the state has expanded the number of testing sites, the rise in new COVID-19 cases has outpaced those efforts.
Miami-Dade feels impact
Alarmed by the rapid rise in cases, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced late Friday that he will be signing an emergency order on Saturday closing all county beaches for the Fourth of July weekend.
Gimenez said in a press release that beaches will close beginning July 3 and ending July 8. The mayor warned that he would extend the beach closure “if conditions do not improve and people do not follow New Normal rules requiring masks to be worn always inside commercial establishments and outdoors when social distancing of at least 6 feet is not possible.”
“If people are not going to be responsible and protect themselves and others from this pandemic, then the government is forced to step in and restore common sense to save lives,” he said.
Gimenez has frequently said that the metric he focuses on the most to gauge the severity of the pandemic is hospitalizations. On Friday morning, there were nearly 1,000 COVID patients in county hospitals. More than 100 patients have been added to the tally each day this week for the first time in the course of the pandemic.
About 200 of the patients are in ICUs, and 85 are on ventilators. Admissions, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue calls are all trending up. Hospital leaders have said recently that more effective treatment and a younger wave of patients being admitted has made the average length of stay much shorter.
But the most vulnerable COVID patients require lots of attention from nurses who are already exhausted from the months-long pandemic, warned Martha Baker, head of the union representing nurses and doctors at Miami’s public hospitals, Jackson Health System, in an interview with WFOR-Channel 4.
“They’re tired. They need time off,” Baker said. “They need more nurses. And now we have more COVIDs than ever.”
County officials, alarmed by the rise in cases, renewed a requirement Friday for hospitals to report twice daily the number of inpatients with COVID-19, ICU capacity, ventilator inventory and other information. Hospitals had been reporting the data once a day.
However, the number of patients in Miami-Dade hospitals spiked on Friday in part because of a reporting error. County officials said they updated the data to include 113 patients in hospitals that had not been reported before.
More people seek testing
Hospital admissions can take place five to 10 days after an infected person has begun to feel symptoms, public health experts say. In the past week, as new cases skyrocket, more Floridians have sought COVID-19 testing.
Some people waited hours in line at state-run drive-thru sites for nasal swab and blood antibody tests. Sites in Orange and Miami-Dade counties reached capacity before their scheduled 5 p.m. closings. The testing site at the Jacksonville Jaguars football stadium also reported it had reached capacity. Each site can perform about 1,000 swab tests a day, though the Orlando site recently boosted its capacity to about 1,600.
As the COVID-19 case count rose in Florida, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere, some federal health officials urged the nation to take precautions such as social distancing, frequent hand washing and wearing a face covering in public.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, urged Americans, particularly young people, to remember they have an important role in slowing the disease’s spread.
“If you get infected, you are part — innocently or inadvertently — of propagating a dynamic process of the pandemic,” Fauci said. “If we want to end this outbreak — really end it, and then hopefully when a vaccine comes and puts a nail in the coffin — we’ve got to realize that we are part of the process.”
