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The Governor's Daily Brief - 8/31/20
TODAY'S TAKEAWAYS |
16th straight day with COVID positivity rates below 10%
Statewide positivity rate falls to 5.5%
Miami Dade goes from 22% to 6.55%
White House Corona Task Force leader, Dr.Atlas comes to Florida
16th straight day with COVID positivity rates below 10%
Statewide positivity rate falls to 5.5%
Miami Dade goes from 22% to 6.55%
White House Corona Task Force leader, Dr.Atlas comes to Florida
Coronavirus: Is it time to move on and get back to normal life?
BBC News
Are the government and media overdoing coronavirus? Is it time to move on and get back to normal life?
These are big questions, and given the parlous state of the economy, they deserve some attention.
Let me start with some positives, which may help encourage the viewpoint I see a lot on social media, that Covid is over, finished, done with.
The trend in deaths and serious illness continues to decline.
The number of patients in hospital who have a confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis has been falling for months.
At the peak in the UK there were around 20,000 - now it's fewer than 800.
At one stage whole intensive care units were full of Covid-19 patients, many of them on ventilators for several weeks.
Again, thankfully, the numbers on ventilators have continued to fall, from 3,300 to 64.
There are many ways of counting Covid-related deaths, but they all show mortality peaked in April and has been falling ever since.
If we look solely at those who died within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, this has fallen by 99% from nearly 1,000 a day to, on average, less than 10.
That compares to an average of 30 men a day who die from prostate cancer, and 30 women from breast cancer. Neither of these figures is read out nightly on the TV news, unlike the statistics for cases and coronavirus deaths.
The Health 202: British schools reopened with little covid-19 spread, new data show
The Washington Post
Now we know what happened when the United Kingdom sent kids back to school.
There were very few coronavirus cases — and they were mostly among teachers, not students.
The United Kingdom’s new report, released yesterday, is the most comprehensive look yet at what might happen when hundreds of thousands of kids return to classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic. The information could prove valuable and timely for schools in the United States, caught in the midst of a heated and politicized debate over the best approach for fall learning.
“I was surprised by how low the numbers were, to be honest,” said Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University, who analyzed the report. “I thought they would be higher.”
U.K. schools saw infection rates of 0.02 percent among staff members and 0.008 percent among students.
The data, collected by the country’s public health agency, comes from reports from nurseries, preschools, elementary schools and secondary schools that reopened for a “mini” summer term in June after the country’s spring shutdowns.
Joe Biden's unserious pandemic response
The Washington Examiner
If it were up to Joe Biden, the national shutdown implemented due to the coronavirus pandemic would never end.
When he accepted the nomination for president on the final night of the Democratic National Convention, he promised that if elected, he would pass a federal mask mandate as part of his effort to defeat the virus.
“It’s a patriotic duty,” he declared.
Of course, Biden didn’t bother to elaborate on this proposed mandate or explain how his administration would enforce it — because he knows that such a heavy-handed restriction would be legally dubious and almost impossible to enforce.
Under the U.S. Constitution, states have the primary duty to protect public health and safety. This is why many of them have been able to pass their own mask mandates, while others have simply encouraged residents to follow suit. No president may usurp that authority even during a pandemic. And no president would have the law enforcement personnel necessary to enforce it, either. At a time when there is supposed to be a national reckoning about excessive policing, do Democrats want to create a new policy that, if enforced, would require many more interactions between police and people in minority neighborhoods?
Masks do not fall under any of the president’s listed constitutional powers, nor under those of Congress. Yet, Biden keeps insisting that a federal mask mandate is not only possible, but necessary. Other Democrats agree. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in June that a national mask mandate is “long overdue,” and other congressional Democrats have claimed that President Trump’s refusal to pass one proves he doesn’t take the coronavirus seriously. But Democrats won't pass such a mandate through Congress because the whole exercise is nothing but an attempt to contrast their supposedly serious coronavirus response with Trump’s. As long as they can see ways to try and make the president look feckless and aloof, Democrats will persist in such attempts and scuttle back to their base and claim they’re the only party willing to act on behalf of the public — even though they’ve never actually followed through.
Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns?
Reason
Human beings are often terrible at foresight and generally learn hard lessons chiefly from failure. That has certainly been the case for the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, politicians, and the public, by means of repeated policy failures, are still learning what works when it comes to mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.
A partial list of initial failures in the U.S. includes underestimating the virulence of the pathogen by some public health officials; a massive bureaucratic screw-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that delayed the rollout of diagnostic testing as the pandemic was taking off; the belief that airborne transmission was not a significant route of infection but instead the virus was chiefly passed along via direct contact with infected people and indirect contact with surfaces in the immediate environment; the early assertion that citizens didn't need to wear face masks to protect themselves from infection; epidemiological models making worst-case projections of millions of COVID-19 deaths by assuming that people wouldn't change their behaviors; the claim that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a "game changer" as a COVID-19 treatment; and a president who has doggedly insisted since February that the virus would miraculously fade or disappear soon.
So what has been learned over the past eight months? While conclusions are still preliminary, researchers now calculate that the COVID-19 coronavirus is about three times more contagious than seasonal flu; the availability of diagnostic testing in the U.S. has greatly improved but is still nowhere near where it needs to be; airborne transmission contributes significantly to the spread of the disease; when the background rate of infections is high the widespread adoption of face masks is an effective and very economically valuable method for stemming COVID-19 infections; when epidemiological models took into account actual changes in human behavior, their COVID-19 death projections declined steeply; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not a useful COVID-19 therapeutic. But what about President Donald Trump's oft-repeated prediction that the virus will one day soon just disappear?
Coronavirus: Florida reports lowest death toll since June
News4Jax
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Florida’s health officials reported on Sunday the lowest number of new coronavirus deaths in more than two months.
The Florida Department of Health tallied 14 additional COVID-19 deaths as the number of known cases of the coronavirus reported each day also continued to drop. It was the lowest daily death toll since June 22, when officials reported 12 new deaths.
One of the deaths reported Sunday was in Northeast Florida: the death of a 73-year-old woman in Putnam County, which has now recorded 37 deaths.
Florida’s total number of deaths since the pandemic began is now at 11,263. The average daily toll reported over the past week is 114.
Deaths from COVID-19 usually occur two weeks or more after diagnosis, so epidemiologists have said Florida’s fatality rate should shrink in the coming weeks if confirmed infections continue to shrink.
Florida’s COVID-19 cases now over 621,000 but trending downward
South Florida Sun Sentinel
Florida’s coronavirus cases maintained a downward swing Sunday, with the state reporting 2,583 new cases and another 14 deaths in the past 24 hours.
No deaths were reported in Broward or Palm Beach counties and only four were reported in Miami-Dade County.
State officials have tallied 621,586 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began — only 21,015 cases more than a week ago, reports from the Florida Department of Health show. As of Sunday, 11,263 people have died from the disease, including 144 people who lived elsewhere but died in Florida..
The deaths reported Sunday represent a sharp decline from the record 277 coronavirus deaths reported on Aug. 11. The one-day peak for new cases was July 12, with 15,300 infections.
BBC News
Are the government and media overdoing coronavirus? Is it time to move on and get back to normal life?
These are big questions, and given the parlous state of the economy, they deserve some attention.
Let me start with some positives, which may help encourage the viewpoint I see a lot on social media, that Covid is over, finished, done with.
The trend in deaths and serious illness continues to decline.
The number of patients in hospital who have a confirmed Covid-19 diagnosis has been falling for months.
At the peak in the UK there were around 20,000 - now it's fewer than 800.
At one stage whole intensive care units were full of Covid-19 patients, many of them on ventilators for several weeks.
Again, thankfully, the numbers on ventilators have continued to fall, from 3,300 to 64.
There are many ways of counting Covid-related deaths, but they all show mortality peaked in April and has been falling ever since.
If we look solely at those who died within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, this has fallen by 99% from nearly 1,000 a day to, on average, less than 10.
That compares to an average of 30 men a day who die from prostate cancer, and 30 women from breast cancer. Neither of these figures is read out nightly on the TV news, unlike the statistics for cases and coronavirus deaths.
The Health 202: British schools reopened with little covid-19 spread, new data show
The Washington Post
Now we know what happened when the United Kingdom sent kids back to school.
There were very few coronavirus cases — and they were mostly among teachers, not students.
The United Kingdom’s new report, released yesterday, is the most comprehensive look yet at what might happen when hundreds of thousands of kids return to classrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic. The information could prove valuable and timely for schools in the United States, caught in the midst of a heated and politicized debate over the best approach for fall learning.
“I was surprised by how low the numbers were, to be honest,” said Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University, who analyzed the report. “I thought they would be higher.”
U.K. schools saw infection rates of 0.02 percent among staff members and 0.008 percent among students.
The data, collected by the country’s public health agency, comes from reports from nurseries, preschools, elementary schools and secondary schools that reopened for a “mini” summer term in June after the country’s spring shutdowns.
Joe Biden's unserious pandemic response
The Washington Examiner
If it were up to Joe Biden, the national shutdown implemented due to the coronavirus pandemic would never end.
When he accepted the nomination for president on the final night of the Democratic National Convention, he promised that if elected, he would pass a federal mask mandate as part of his effort to defeat the virus.
“It’s a patriotic duty,” he declared.
Of course, Biden didn’t bother to elaborate on this proposed mandate or explain how his administration would enforce it — because he knows that such a heavy-handed restriction would be legally dubious and almost impossible to enforce.
Under the U.S. Constitution, states have the primary duty to protect public health and safety. This is why many of them have been able to pass their own mask mandates, while others have simply encouraged residents to follow suit. No president may usurp that authority even during a pandemic. And no president would have the law enforcement personnel necessary to enforce it, either. At a time when there is supposed to be a national reckoning about excessive policing, do Democrats want to create a new policy that, if enforced, would require many more interactions between police and people in minority neighborhoods?
Masks do not fall under any of the president’s listed constitutional powers, nor under those of Congress. Yet, Biden keeps insisting that a federal mask mandate is not only possible, but necessary. Other Democrats agree. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in June that a national mask mandate is “long overdue,” and other congressional Democrats have claimed that President Trump’s refusal to pass one proves he doesn’t take the coronavirus seriously. But Democrats won't pass such a mandate through Congress because the whole exercise is nothing but an attempt to contrast their supposedly serious coronavirus response with Trump’s. As long as they can see ways to try and make the president look feckless and aloof, Democrats will persist in such attempts and scuttle back to their base and claim they’re the only party willing to act on behalf of the public — even though they’ve never actually followed through.
Could the COVID-19 Epidemic Fade This Fall Without New Lockdowns?
Reason
Human beings are often terrible at foresight and generally learn hard lessons chiefly from failure. That has certainly been the case for the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials, politicians, and the public, by means of repeated policy failures, are still learning what works when it comes to mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.
A partial list of initial failures in the U.S. includes underestimating the virulence of the pathogen by some public health officials; a massive bureaucratic screw-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that delayed the rollout of diagnostic testing as the pandemic was taking off; the belief that airborne transmission was not a significant route of infection but instead the virus was chiefly passed along via direct contact with infected people and indirect contact with surfaces in the immediate environment; the early assertion that citizens didn't need to wear face masks to protect themselves from infection; epidemiological models making worst-case projections of millions of COVID-19 deaths by assuming that people wouldn't change their behaviors; the claim that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a "game changer" as a COVID-19 treatment; and a president who has doggedly insisted since February that the virus would miraculously fade or disappear soon.
So what has been learned over the past eight months? While conclusions are still preliminary, researchers now calculate that the COVID-19 coronavirus is about three times more contagious than seasonal flu; the availability of diagnostic testing in the U.S. has greatly improved but is still nowhere near where it needs to be; airborne transmission contributes significantly to the spread of the disease; when the background rate of infections is high the widespread adoption of face masks is an effective and very economically valuable method for stemming COVID-19 infections; when epidemiological models took into account actual changes in human behavior, their COVID-19 death projections declined steeply; and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not a useful COVID-19 therapeutic. But what about President Donald Trump's oft-repeated prediction that the virus will one day soon just disappear?
Coronavirus: Florida reports lowest death toll since June
News4Jax
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Florida’s health officials reported on Sunday the lowest number of new coronavirus deaths in more than two months.
The Florida Department of Health tallied 14 additional COVID-19 deaths as the number of known cases of the coronavirus reported each day also continued to drop. It was the lowest daily death toll since June 22, when officials reported 12 new deaths.
One of the deaths reported Sunday was in Northeast Florida: the death of a 73-year-old woman in Putnam County, which has now recorded 37 deaths.
Florida’s total number of deaths since the pandemic began is now at 11,263. The average daily toll reported over the past week is 114.
Deaths from COVID-19 usually occur two weeks or more after diagnosis, so epidemiologists have said Florida’s fatality rate should shrink in the coming weeks if confirmed infections continue to shrink.
Florida’s COVID-19 cases now over 621,000 but trending downward
South Florida Sun Sentinel
Florida’s coronavirus cases maintained a downward swing Sunday, with the state reporting 2,583 new cases and another 14 deaths in the past 24 hours.
No deaths were reported in Broward or Palm Beach counties and only four were reported in Miami-Dade County.
State officials have tallied 621,586 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began — only 21,015 cases more than a week ago, reports from the Florida Department of Health show. As of Sunday, 11,263 people have died from the disease, including 144 people who lived elsewhere but died in Florida..
The deaths reported Sunday represent a sharp decline from the record 277 coronavirus deaths reported on Aug. 11. The one-day peak for new cases was July 12, with 15,300 infections.
COVID-19 by the numbers | COVID -19 Fatalities
ICUs and hospital beds by the numbers | Current as of 8/27/2020
23.9%% of ICU Beds Available Statewide
40.36%% of Pediatric ICU Beds Available Statewide
27.53%% of Available Hospital Beds Statewide
23.9%% of ICU Beds Available Statewide
40.36%% of Pediatric ICU Beds Available Statewide
27.53%% of Available Hospital Beds Statewide
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