Florida COVID-19 cases soar again, California sees surge stabilize

- The coronavirus pandemic raged in Florida yesterday as the state reported more than 10,000 new infections for a sixth day in a row, but California saw improvement, with cases and hospitalizations beginning to stabilize after a surge. Florida has become the epicenter of the latest COVID-19 surge, prompting the state’s teachers union to sue Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over his plan to reopen schools for in-class instruction. In California, which emerged as another coronavirus hotspot in July, Governor Gavin Newsom said new infections, hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions were all still rising in the nation’s most populous state but not nearly at the pace of recent weeks.

“We are seeing a reduction in the rate of growth but a rate of growth nonetheless,” Newsom, a Democrat, said at a briefing in Sacramento.

“Hospitalizations and ICU (admissions) continue to be cause of concern in this state. That’s why we want everybody to double down on what we’ve been doing,” the governor said.

Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived to pitch in at strapped Southern California hospitals.

“We really pushed up last week to our limits. If we had continued to see accelerating number of cases coming into the hospital, something would have to give,” said Dr. Allan Williamson, chief medical officer at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, east of Los Angeles.

“So fortunately, the federal government, through the Department of Defense was able to step in and provide us some additional staffing, which has really helped us a lot,” Williamson said.