South Florida clamps down while cases hit new peak and COVID patients fill hospitals

On the day Florida recorded a record high single-day of 10,109 new cases of COVID-19, South Florida’s local governments responded with more restrictions — including a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in Miami-Dade — as patient volumes at local hospitals continued to swell past the high water mark from early April.

Amid those developments, the health department reported the death of an 11-year-old boy in Miami-Dade, the youngest person to succumb from the novel coronavirus in the state.

After weeks of surging case numbers, health officials scrambled to ramp up testing to the maximum capacity of 28,000 tests a day at the 47 state-run sites dotting Florida. Familiar scenes of winding car lanes filled with people waiting to get tested have spurred renewed complaints about the difficulty of getting a test and how long it takes to get results.

As South Florida heads into the Fourth of July holiday weekend with beaches closed in Miami-Dade and Broward, local government leaders pleaded with residents to obey recently enacted face mask orders or risk a repeat shutdown of non-essential businesses — a drastic measure from which the state has struggled to recover, with more than 1 million people now on Florida’s unemployment rolls and a statewide unemployment rate of about 12%, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report.

At Miami-Dade hospitals, what started as a slow but steady rise of COVID patients arriving two weeks after Memorial Day intensified over the last week, with the number of patients admitted on Thursday reaching a new high of 1,364.

About 280 of those patients were in ICUs, a number that has been steadily climbing. Many of those needing intensive care now are more severely ill than the COVID-19 patients seen in March and April, said Dr. David De La Zerda, a pulmonary disease and critical care specialist in charge of the intensive care unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

“Right now I’m seeing like everybody can get sick,” De La Zerda said. “From the healthy to the young, everyone can get sick.”

In the first wave of COVID-19 patients to hit Jackson Health in March and April, De La Zerda said, many were older with underlying health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. The latest wave of patients is predominantly younger, and even those who are healthy are getting sicker when they’re admitted to the ICU.

De La Zerda said it’s hard to explain why some young patients are getting sicker. He believes it might have to do with the way people are getting exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — indoors and for long periods, such as at house parties.

“We just have theories,” he said. “What I think is when people get exposed to more people ... the viral load when they get exposed is higher than before. The age group we’re seeing is people who go to parties and go to the beach.”

Though many think of COVID-19 as a disease primarily affecting older people, Thursday’s announcement of the death of the 11-year-old boy in Miami-Dade underscored the threat of severe outcomes for young people as well.

Daequan Wimberly, of Miami, died at Jackson Memorial Hospital on June 30 of COVID-19 pneumonia, according to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office. The boy’s immune system was complicated by “multiple congenital abnormalities,” the medical examiner said.

More than 7,000 children under 18 have tested positive for the disease in Florida since the pandemic began in March. Of those, at least 2,865 were confirmed to be in South Florida.

Patients who need intensive care for COVID-19 tend to stay longer in the hospital, requiring more staff and resources, such as protective gear. Jackson Health, the county’s public hospital system, reported 315 patients with COVID-19 at its three hospitals in Miami-Dade.

De la Zerda said Jackson Health, the county’s public hospital system, has enough capacity to handle a surge in patients now that non-emergency surgeries have been canceled for a second time.

Reflecting on the state’s worsening crisis, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who has ordered a crackdown on businesses that do not follow the county’s face coverings and social distancing orders, sounded a somber note Thursday morning.

“No one wants to go back to close nonessential businesses,” Gimenez said at Charles Hadley Park in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood. “I know how much suffering that has caused for working families. So please, everybody, follow the rules.”

The state’s rising number of cases and hospitalizations for COVID-19 is also driving a spike in demand for testing at state-run test sites and private clinics. Quest Diagnostics, which has processed more of Florida’s COVID-19 tests than any commercial lab, said earlier this week that demand was outpacing capacity, warning that people will be waiting longer to receive results.

Even as the number of people getting tested rose again after plateauing for three days, the percentage of the results coming back positive has continued to get worse, shifting the two-week average for the county to nearly 20%, well above the 10% threshold public health experts agree represents adequate testing.

Speedy results and easy access to testing are the bedrock to any measures that may succeed in containing the virus; ideally that means tracing the contacts of known positives and asking them to self-isolate, public health experts agree.

State Sen. Annette Taddeo, a Democrat representing Southwest Miami-Dade, said she had tried to schedule a test for a loved one on Thursday morning but the slots for tests had filled up shortly after 9 a.m.

“I’m concerned the numbers are worse than they are because they’re stopping the tests,” Taddeo told the Miami Herald later that day.

Taddeo highlighted that multiple South Florida hospitals had decided to halt elective surgeries, echoing the escalating crisis of April, but this time, it wasn’t public officials ordering the hospitals to act.

“They did it on their own, and that tells you everything,” Taddeo said. “It’s really sad we’ve gotten to that point because the elected officials are not acting, and [the hospitals] are making these decisions on their own because the writing is on the wall.”