Central Florida numbers rising
Local officials say bump should not overwhelm area
Coronavirus cases in Central Florida have been increasing since the statewide stay-at-home order was lifted in early May, but local officials say it’s too soon to press the panic button.
Although hospitalizations, which are among the key indicators of COVID-19 trouble in a community, have also risen since hitting a low in mid-May, they continue to be below their peak in early April, according to local health systems.
“We’re pretty reassured that this sort of bump, which we had anticipated, isn’t anything that’s going to overwhelm us,” said Dr. George Ralls, chief quality officer for Orlando Health. “The most important thing people can do is remain vigilant in the way that they’re socializing.”
Orange County has experienced a 64% increase in the number of COVID-19 cases between May 5 and June 9. Osceola County had a 46% increase, Lake County’s increase was at 43% and
Seminole County had a 34% increase, according to an analysis for the Orlando Sentinel.
Officials attribute some of the increase to more testing, Memorial Day weekend outings and people starting to get out more. It’s likely too soon to know if the thousands of people at the George Floyd protests in downtown Orlando contributed to the rise, because there is a two- to three-week delay between infection and symptoms.
Caitie Phillips, 29, has slowly become more comfortable venturing outdoors. She’s gone to Santiago’s Bodega twice and has marched downtown in two of the largest protests in the region that took place last Tuesday and Saturday.
“I will say, and a lot of my friends share this same sentiment, it’s really confusing that things opened up and the virus didn’t go anywhere,” said Phillips, a Mills-50 resident who manages a marketing team.
She’s planning to get tested for the virus this week, just to be safe.
“It’s easy to forget that nothing has really changed, and there’s not a cure yet,” she said.
On Wednesday, Florida added another 1,371 coronavirus cases,
and the death toll reached 2,801. The state has now logged 67,371 infections.
The update from the Florida Department of Health marks the seventh time in the past eight days that the state saw more than 1,000 daily cases, but statewide testing continues to expand as well.
Public health officials give less weight to the daily spikes in the number of cases, but they take note when a clear trend emerges over time.
That might be happening in Orange County, where the raw number of cases have been on the rise for the past week.
“We have to observe to see if this is a pattern, but we are clearly climbing in numbers,” said Dr. Raul Pino, health officer at the Department of Health in Orange County during a press briefing this week.
The numbers in Lake, Osceola and Seminole counties have had more fluctuations compared with Orange County, according to the Florida Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard.
Florida is one of about 19 states where the rate of infections per 100,000 people is on the rise. Cases in Arizona have increased to the point that the hospital intensive care units are once again filling up, prompting the state to ask hospitals to activate their emergency plans.
“One of my biggest fears is that we won’t actually respond to the spike until the hospitals do start filling up and there will already be a big backlog of cases,” said Dr. Stephen Kissler, postdoctoral fellow in immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “And that’s when things become really difficult to handle.”
When it comes to testing,
Florida is faring well. The state is testing about 62,000 people per 1 million populations, although it still falls behind nearly half of the states who are performing more tests. Rhode Island, New York and New Mexico are currently testing more than 100,000 people per 1 million population, according to analysis by Covidly.com.
Because of expanded testing across the state, the percentage of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 has declined since May 5, when Florida entered its first phase of reopening.
On May 5, Orange County’s positivity rate was 5%. By June 9 that rate dropped to 3%. Seminole County’s rate dropped from 5% to 2% during that period, while Osceola’s dropped from 8% to 5% and Lake County from 3% to 2%, according to Florida Department of Health’s daily reports.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation modeling, which accounts for increased testing, projects that with expanded testing, the estimated number of infections in Florida will continue to decline through August.
Meanwhile, the individual hospital data for each county is not publicly available. Florida is one of seven states that don’t report the daily number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 and provide only the total number of hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic.
AdventHealth and Orlando Health, the two major hospital systems in Orlando, said that they have had slightly more COVID-19 patients in recent days compared with prior weeks, but the numbers aren’t alarming so far.
On June 8, Orlando Health had 28 COVID-19 patients, compared with a high of 54 on April 8 and an average of 20 patients during last week, said Ralls.
The health system’s lowest caseload was on May 22 with five patients.
He added that in case of a peak, the health system is better prepared compared to its first bout with the onslaught of COVID-19 patients.
AdventHealth would not share its COVID-19 patient census, only saying in a statement that it has seen “a slight uptick, but remains close to our low point following the peak in local cases.”
The number of emergency room visits for cough, fever or shortness of breath — the hallmark signs of COVID-19 — have also remained low compared with their peak in mid-March, according to the Florida Department of Health data for Orange County.
Local officials say part of the reason behind lower hospitalization numbers here could be because people who are testing positive with the virus are getting younger.
In all, half of the new cases of the novel coronavirus over the past two weeks in Orange County are people between the ages of 20 and 40, Pino said. The median age is 35, also lower than the pandemic’s peak here in April.
“Although we don’t want anyone to be affected, it means that a population that is able to handle the infection better is the one acquiring the infection at this point,” Pino said
Dan Suárez, 31, fits in that demographic.
Suárez, of Winter Springs, has been out twice with his wife to CityWalk in recent weeks, marking their first outings aside from essential errands since the pandemic struck in March.
The couple took hand sanitizer and wore masks unless they were eating or drinking.
“They were doing temperature checks, so that kind of eased our fears a little more,” he said, noting they were seated at a table indoors, but far from other customers. “We were worried about everybody else, too.”
The Institute for Health Metrics’ data show that the Floridians’ mobility dropped by nearly 60% at the beginning of stay-athome orders in early April. But more people have started to leave their homes since then, even though the state’s overall mobility statistics are still about 34% below where they were before the pandemic.
“Florida has been doing a wonderful job in terms of containing the virus,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, professor and chief strategy officer of population health at IHME. “But the key factor is will [people] feel a sense of security now that they’re not seeing the mortality and they’ll begin relaxing. That’s my concern.”
Without a vaccine or effective treatment for the virus, experts worry about the spread of the virus, which can cause severe illness and death among people with underlying chronic conditions and older adults.
In Florida, nearly 80% of all COVID-19 deaths have been among adults 65 years and older.
“Even from the beginning of this outbreak, I think many of my colleagues and I sort of anticipated to this phase of epidemiological whack-amole, where we’re going to see cases starting to rise, and we’re going to have to shut things down again and then cases will fall and you can slowly open things back up again,” Kissler said. “So, I think that this very well may be the first of many phases of this, where we sort of begin to reopen, and then we have to pull back a little.”