More coverage
Florida will start reporting how many people are hospitalized with COVID-19.
As hospital admissions for COVID-19 soar in Miami-Dade and more patients entering hospitals for other healthcare needs test positive for the virus, the governor’s office said Tuesday that the state will start reporting current hospitalization numbers for all counties this week.
Miami-Dade County has released those numbers publicly for several months, but the state hadn’t been doing the same.
The number of people entering hospitals per day for COVID-19 is a key piece of information that public health experts monitor to measure the severity of the disease’s resurgence and the potential strain on hospital systems. In Miami-Dade, Mayor Carlos Gimenez ordered hospitals to report patient admissions, ICU capacity, ventilator inventory and other data every day starting on April 4.
Florida has been an outlier among states in not reporting the number of patients currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Instead, the state Department of Health has been reporting the total number of patients admitted to hospitals during the course of the pandemic. The Agency for Health Care Administration, meanwhile, reports a different figure: daily hospital bed capacity.
As cases surged in recent weeks, public health experts and the nonprofit COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer group that has become the most prolific coronavirus data collector in the country, pressured the state to start reporting current hospitalizations, saying the information is a clearer way of assessing how bad the pandemic is getting.
After questions from the Miami Herald about why the state was not reporting the data, the spokeswoman for Gov. Ron DeSantis said the health department will begin reporting more detailed daily hospital admissions data this week.
“This information will be incorporated into the COVID reporting within the next few days and will be publicly available,” said Helen Aguirre Ferré, communications director for the governor.
Florida’s health department on Tuesday confirmed 6,093 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the state’s total past 152,400.
Miami-Dade is the state’s hardest hit county with more than 36,000 cases and nearly 1,000 deaths to date. On Tuesday, more than 1,200 patients with COVID-19 filled local hospital beds — more than at any point during the pandemic. About 245 patients with the disease were in an intensive care unit and 103 needed a ventilator. The county’s “New Normal” dashboard does not break down patient admissions by hospital.
On Tuesday, the health department’s dashboard for tracking the disease showed that a total of 14,580 patients have been hospitalized statewide since the first case was reported in March, including 3,962 people in Miami-Dade.
AHCA, which regulates hospitals, maintains a dashboard that showed less than 20% of adult ICU beds and about 22% of acute care hospital beds statewide were available on Tuesday. But the dashboard does not reflect additional ICU and patient capacity that hospitals can create by converting beds and making other changes.
Neither the health department or AHCA report daily admissions for COVID-19, ventilator inventory or other statistics that hospital administrators and public health experts can use to monitor the disease’s growth and anticipate future needs.
In Miami-Dade, where more than 1,000 new cases a day have been reported since June 25, public health experts have used hospital admission data to measure the severity of the resurgence.
Jackson Health System, the county’s public hospital network, reported 265 total patients in the hospital with the disease on Tuesday. About 40 percent of those patients tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, after they had been to the hospital for another reason, such as a car accident, a heart attack or childbirth.
Speaking via video at a meeting of Jackson Health’s board of trustees Tuesday, CEO Carlos Migoya said the hospital system has seen “a dramatic increase” in patients in the past two weeks.
“We’re now more than in excess of the numbers we had seen in the peak back in April,” Migoya said. At the height of the pandemic in April, a hospital spokesman said, Jackson Health had 167 patients with COVID-19, though fewer patients were being tested for the disease at the time because tests were scarce and the criteria was restricted to high-risk groups.
Migoya noted that every patient who tests positive must be isolated, and that hospital staff who care for them must use more costly protective gear, such as N-95 respirator masks, face shields, gowns and gloves — driving up expenses at a time when the $2 billion-ayear public hospital is hurting financially.
Jackson Health lost $25 million in May as overall patient admissions dropped due to non-emergency surgeries that were canceled in response to the pandemic. Migoya said the crisis is likely to continue as new cases rise. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 typically occur seven to 10 days after symptoms begin.
“We’re not only not going to have an end any time soon,” Migoya told Jackson Health trustees, “but we foresee that we probably will have additional increases that will have additional challenges to the organization.”
At Baptist Health South Florida, which operates hospitals from Monroe to Palm Beach counties, including six in Miami-Dade, the number of patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 has nearly doubled over the last month.
On May 30, Baptist Health hospitals had 206 patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19. On Tuesday, there were 393 cases across the system.
Georgi Pipkin, communications director for Baptist Health, said in a prepared statement that the hospital system is able to manage capacity through transfers and by working with other hospitals in the region. Hospital administrators in South Florida hold daily conference calls with each other and with state regulators to monitor their response to the pandemic.
Dr. Allan Feingold, a pulmonary specialist at South Miami Hospital, which is part of Baptist Health, said in an email Tuesday that the data provided by the health department did not reveal the recent increase in hospital admissions across South Florida.
Feingold said that he and other Baptist Health doctors were scheduled to meet with the health department to talk about the limitations of the health department’s data and how to improve reporting of key metrics that can give doctors and public health experts more information to work with.
“For us,” Feingold said, “the real concern and the unanswered question as yet is whether or not this is going to result in some kind of really big stress on our hospitals. I think that the answer is it’s too early to tell.”
Most of Florida’s new COVID-19 cases are younger on average than those identified in March and April, which means they’re at a lower risk of severe outcomes, Feingold said. He added that treatments and therapies such as Remdesivir have improved patient care, and will lead to fewer patients needing admission to an ICU. Though the median age of new cases statewide since June 16 is 35, public health experts say the disease will eventually affect the elderly and others considered at high risk for severe illness if it continues to spread unchecked.
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said messaging is key to engaging Floridians in a collective effort to follow social distancing.