Florida data contradicts Pence’s claim of ‘flattening’ the curve
Florida Department of Health data shows the percentage of people testing positive each day is still trending upward. Other indicators also contradict the White House.
At a coronavirus task force briefing Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence touted Florida data that he said showed the COVID-19 outbreak was waning in Florida and that the state was again flattening the curve.
“We’re actually seeing early indications of a percent of positive testing flattening in Arizona and Florida and Texas,” Pence said.
But Florida Department of Health data analyzed by the Miami Herald shows the percentage of people testing positive each day is still trending upward in Florida. Other indicators are similarly troubling and contradict the White House’s hopeful message.
Over the last two weeks, Florida’s daily positivity rate — the percentage of individuals testing positive out of the total tested — has increased from a three-day average of 11.22% to 15.96%.
“When I saw that [Pence] clip, I got nauseous
because it’s obvious propaganda,” said Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego.
Topol suggested that what states should strive for is a positivity rate of less than 3%, and ideally, as low as 1%.
“To have anything in the double digits is scary. When you’re at 15% that means you basically have spread that is unchecked unbridled and that’s where Florida is now with those numbers,” Topol said. Although the
in positivity did slow slightly over the past week, positivity never began to decline. Total daily testing, while inconsistent, has also seen an overall decline in recent weeks.
Robert Bednarczyk, an assistant professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health at Rollins College, added that until there is “sustained decrease” in the positivity rate, high positivity suggests that the “level of infection of the population is that high.”
Pence encouraged Floridians on Wednesday to “keep doing what you’re doing” because, he said, “we’re beginning to see indications that [mitigation efforts] are having a good effect.” But statewide mitigation efforts have been few. Deaths and new cases continue to rise, suggesting current efforts have not been enough to significantly reduce the spread of the virus.
The number of new confirmed cases per day skyrocketed in Florida by the end of June, dwarfing daily records from April. Florida has broken the daily record for the number of new cases in a 24hour period five times. On Saturday, July 4, DOH reported 11,458 new cases, a record high. On Friday, with the president coming to town for a fundraiser, the state nearly matched that number, logging
11,433 new confirmed cases.
During the briefing, Dr. Deborah Birx from the White House coronavirus task force suggested that Florida’s numbers may have been higher in the first three days of this week because of a backlog in reported cases after the Fourth of July weekend. Monday DOH added a little over 6,300 cases, and Tuesday DOH reported 7,347 new cases. Those numbers are lower than what was reported on Sunday or Saturday.
Birx also said the increase in new cases in Florida could not be tied to reopening.
“The governor talks about how they were ‘steady and low’ for a long period of time after reopening,” she said. “That is reflected for almost five weeks after reopening.”
But a Herald analysis from June showed that new cases and positivity ticked upward in early May, even prior to reopening. By the time the state entered Phase 2 of its reopening, the numbers were showing what experts called “leading indicators of a resurgence” of COVID-19 in Florida. That resurgence began within two weeks of initial reopening, the analysis shows — the amount of time experts say it takes to see the impact of policy decisions on rates of transmission.
In response to the Herald’s requests for comment, the vice president’s office referred reporters back to the presentation that Birx gave on Wednesday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the task force, said Florida opened too soon. The state “jumped over a couple of checkpoints,” Fauci said Thursday in an interview with FiveThirtyEight. He was absent from Wednesday’s briefing.
Gov. Ron DeSantis defended the state’s decision to reopen at a news conference in Orlando on Friday and echoed the vice president’s comments.
HOSPITAL CAPACITY ‘REMAINS STRONG’
Both Pence and Birx pointed to what they called positive indicators regarding hospital capacity in Florida. But state data show that statewide around 19% of hospital beds are available.
ICU availability is also low in the state. Statewide the average availability of ICU beds is around 15%, according to hospital data reported by the Agency for Health Care Administration. The agency launched the dashboard sometime in April. Not all counties are included in AHCA’s report since not all have hospitals or ICUs.
Summer is often the slow season for hospitals, and admissions often pick up toward the end of the year as people meet their health insurance deductibles and want to get procedures before the new year starts.
The dashboard also doesn’t include additional capacity that hospitals can create by converting beds and using additional space.
Another issue that has been reported on in hospitals is staffing. Hospitals in Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties have halted elective surgeries because of the rising number of patients being admitted for COVID-19.
Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that the state would send 100 contract employees to help at
Jackson Memorial, MiamiDade’s public hospital. During the task force briefing, Pence said they were “processing requests from Florida for additional support.”
The number of people being admitted into hospitals daily is a key piece of information that public experts monitor to measure the strain on the healthcare system and the gravity of any resurgence.
For months, the state didn’t report this information and the governor’s office promised the Herald last week that it would begin reporting current hospitalization numbers for all counties.
On Friday, AHCA confirmed to the Miami Herald that a new column was added to its dashboard that includes current statewide and county-level hospitalizations.
DeSantis said on Friday there was an advantage to having the arc of the pandemic spread over a sustained period in Florida.
“There’s no question that has given our healthcare system a better chance at dealing with the clinical consequences of this,’‘ he said. “We have PPE. We have a lot of stuff that was tough at the beginning. But it does mean it goes on, you know, longer than if you had a boom or bust.”
Since Monday, the governor has shifted his messaging from arguing that reopening the state was justified because the number of people testing positive for the disease was declining to now stating that the virus may be more prevalent than the state acknowledged, but it is not a problem as long as people are not dying from it.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez ordered hospitals to report data to the county on April 4. The data shared daily on the county’s “New Normal Dashboard” includes COVID-19 hospital admissions, ICU capacity, ventilator use and other key metrics.
According to Thursday’s dashboard, fewer than 9 percent of ICU beds are available. The number of admitted patients has tripled since Memorial Day weekend and doubled in the past two weeks, breaking daily records often.