Miami-Dade bars and clubs allowed to reopen under DeSantis order, mask fines suspended

Miami-Dade County will reopen bars and nightclubs and will stop issuing citations for not wearing masks outdoors after a sweeping order Friday by Gov. Ron DeSantis ended state and some local rules tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

The executive order, which took effect Friday afternoon, ends a countywide closure order for bars, nightclubs and strip clubs through Miami-Dade, though Miami-Dade can impose capacity and other restrictions on how those businesses can operate during the pandemic.

Miami-Dade curfew to remain in effect

Mayor Carlos Gimenez said the county’s 11 p.m. curfew will remain in place, and that the county plans to continue requiring masks inside businesses if given the legal go-ahead to keep the facial-covering rule.

“We want to ensure compliance with the state order, while also continuing to act in the best interests of our community,” Gimenez, the Republican candidate for the 26th congressional district, said in a statement.

The decision comes after the governor’s executive order said local government could not enforce restaurant and bar closures, and banned fines and fees tied to local COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

DeSantis said “as an act of executive grace” all fines and fees attached to local COVID-19 regulations — such as the countywide mask mandate — would be suspended starting Friday afternoon.

“I think we need to get away from trying to penalize people for social distancing, and just work with people constructively,” DeSantis said at a news conference in St. Petersburg.

While restaurants are now guaranteed the right to operate at the 50% cap Miami-Dade and other local governments have already imposed, the governor’s executive order also requires municipalities to justify restrictions that keep restaurants from operating at less than 100%. The governor’s decree said local orders must lay out the justification and state the economic cost of tougher capacity restrictions — language still missing from Miami-Dade’s orders as of Saturday morning.

While the situation would allow Miami-Dade restaurants to operate at full capacity for the moment, insiders expect Gimenez to try and impose a new set of regulations that would pass muster with the DeSantis decree.

“There is a restriction coming. We just don’t know how, what or how much just yet,” said Carlos Gazitúa, CEO of Sergio’s Cuban restaurants and chair of the government relations committee for the Florida Restaurants & Lodging Association.

The curfew and mask mandate in place since July have become central elements to the Gimenez plan to fight COVID, a strategy that’s targeted nightlife and put a priority on reducing interactions when people don’t have their faces covered. Since July, police and code enforcers across Miami-Dade have issued 1,250 citations against individuals for violating mask orders, according to the Clerk of the Court’s Office. They each carry a $100 fine.

Miami-Dade restaurants were already allowed to operate half-full dining rooms, and Gimenez said recently he’s close to allowing bars to reopen under the same kind of cap as long as patrons remain seated.

Miami-Dade Schools await guidance from state

Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County Public Schools is waiting for guidance from the state as to what the order means for schools in the county, said Jaquelyn Calzadilla, a district spokeswoman.

Some city mayors across Miami-Dade County lauded DeSantis’ decision to let them justify their restrictions, but said the reopening plan is “premature” for a part of the state where medical experts have expressed concern over COVID-19 cases, which are flattening for reasons hard to discern.

“This is a political decision, clearly not inspired by an instinct to protect our residents or our economy. Preventing us from enforcing rules requiring mask usage is senseless and will only get more people sick,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said.

The state should move forward into the next phase based on numbers the medical community is comfortable with, not “as a result of impatience and a lack of discipline,” said Pinecrest Mayor Joseph Corradino, who also serves as the vice president of the Miami-Dade County League of Cities.

“If [the number of COVID-19 cases] spikes, the time to stop it is now, not after it’s out of control,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s the right thing for our county right now. We can’t keep making the same mistakes over and over again. It’s not good leadership.”

On the contrary, Homestead Mayor Steven Losner said he sees DeSantis’ rationale. There should be consistency from county to county, he said, and it doesn’t make sense to have different rules in parts of the state like South Florida, where North Miami-Dade County and South Broward County restaurants may share a street.

He added that rising positivity rates and less hospital capacity in “harder-hit counties” like Miami-Dade should be the benchmarks for local governments who want to justify reducing capacity.

As of Friday, Miami-Dade’s positivity rate was 5.40% for new cases. While low, it’s higher than the positivity rates posted Friday in Broward (3.02%), Palm Beach (2.92%) and Monroe (4.37%) counties.

The governor has repeatedly hinted in past weeks that the state would soon move into the last phase of the state’s reopening process, “rather than suppress society.”

Prior to the executive order, the state’s most recent rollback was allowing bars to reopen at 50% capacity on Sept. 14.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious disease and pandemic expert at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, said he was surprised the state would lift further business restrictions when parts of the state had ongoing caseloads above what federal officials consider acceptable.

Cities like Miami and Tallahassee are still seeing about 14 cases per 100,000 people, which is considered the most dangerous risk category by the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Inglesby said.

“To make these changes when many places are trying to bring their kids back to schools without big outbreaks ... is really worrisome,” Inglesby said. “To loosen up the approach when Florida already has a substantial burden of disease right now — what do they expect to happen? Do they expect things are going to get better?”

Florida adds more than 2,800 COVID cases Friday

On Friday, Florida added 2,847 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, bringing the statewide total to 695,887, the third-highest number of cases in the country, after California and Texas.

DeSantis made his case against more business restrictions and future lockdowns on Thursday during a roundtable discussion with three experts in the field of medicine who have become darlings of conservative media during the pandemic. None of them are trained epidemiologists.

All three advised against lockdowns, penalizing students who go to parties while attending college, and advocated for reopening businesses and schools.

“Another lockdown would be disastrous, governor,” said Stanford University professor of medicine Jayantha Bhattacharya. “Right now, we know that the benefits of a lockdown are small … all they do is push cases into the future. It doesn’t actually prevent the disease from happening.”

In a nutshell, the governor said, the state’s focus should be on mitigation efforts that shift “infections away from the at-risk group rather than suppressing society as a whole.”

At the time, the governor argued university policies that threaten students with suspension for attending large parties or defied social distancing guidelines were “incredibly draconian,” and said he would look into exploring options to loosen them.

A lax attitude toward younger people ignores two crucial realities, Inglesby said, that younger people are still vulnerable to severe outcomes of the disease and that they can not be totally isolated from older and more vulnerable populations.

“There is no way to sector off different age groups in this country,” Inglesby said. “We all live together.”

The novel coronovirus has killed more than 203,000 people in the United States, the highest death total in the world, by far. (Brazil has the next highest number of deaths at about 140,000, according to the New York Times coronavirus database.)

Nearly a third of the U.S. deaths were people under the age of 65, Inglesby said.

“We should expect a doubling of [deaths] if your goal is to double the number of people infected,” Inglesby said. “Extraordinary numbers of people are going to die from this illness before immunity is achieved in the population.”

In late June, as the number of COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing in Florida, DeSantis said Floridians ages 18-44 were the driving force for the state’s spike in cases. That was weeks after Florida moved to Phase 2 of its three-phase reopening process, and bars, movie theaters and other indoor venues had been allowed to reopen at 50% capacity.

“You can’t control … they’re younger people,” he said in late June. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

Florida’s number of new coronavirus cases has fallen in recent months, although there’s been a slight increase this month. Hospitalizations from COVID-19, too, have been falling sharply but have flattened out this month.

The virus has killed nearly 14,000 people in Florida.

As the governor announced a sweeping reopening strategy for the state, he acknowledged that the pandemic is not over but argued society should not be required to stop because of it.

“The fact that you continue to move forward with the economy doesn’t mean the virus disappears. So people should just understand it is something we are going to have to deal with,” he said. “But doing that from a fetal position, where society flounders, people are out of work, kids aren’t in school, that is not going to work.”

Restrictions lifted: Here’s what you can and can’t do in Miami this weekend

Miami Herald reporters Ben Conrack, Carlos Frias and Colleen Wright contributed to this report.