COVID surges as South Florida braces for record holiday crush
A busy Memorial Day weekend to kick off the summer season will collide with a troubling rise in COVID-19 cases. The CDC’s advice? Wear a mask.
Record numbers of visitors are expected in South Florida for Memorial Day weekend at the same time that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning about rising COVID-19 cases and hospital admissions in the region — casting a pandemic cloud over what is typically a raucous start to the summer season.
With concerts, an air and sea show and countless parties planned throughout Miami and
Fort Lauderdale this holiday weekend, public health experts say that few people are likely to hear or to heed the CDC’s recommendation to wear a wellfitting face mask indoors in public, regardless of vaccination status.
The CDC’s warnings come at a moment in the more than two-year-old pandemic when many Americans appear to be ignoring the signs of a resurgent virus in Florida and elsewhere.
“We all want to return back to normal and are frustrated,” said Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist with the University of South Florida.
With so many people having contracted the virus in recent months, Salemi said it might seem like everyone knows someone who has COVID-19 or just got over a case — and very few people see their friends and relatives getting severely ill or hospitalized because there is so much immunity already built up from vaccines and prior infections, further eroding the CDC’s calls for caution.
“We’ve paid a very stiff price in the past couple of waves to build up some immunity,” he said. “The reason we’re seeing the increase in hospitalizations is less pronounced than the increase in cases is because that immunity is blunting the effects of community transmission.”
But many of the same principles that applied early during the pandemic are still in play, particularly the need for the healthy many to protect the vulnerable few, said Dr. Carla
McWilliams, chief of infectious diseases for Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston.
“If you think about it more on a populationbased level and what risk you might be causing other people, then the right thing to do is to wear a mask to get community transmission back down,” McWilliams said.
McWilliams acknowledged, however, that getting through to people about the importance of protecting the vulnerable won’t be easy.
“I don’t think you can wrap it into a simple message,” she said.
SOUTH FLORIDA LEADS RISE IN THE STATE
What is clear from state and federal health data is that Miami-Dade and Broward are leading a COVID-19 resurgence in Florida, with the number of new cases and hospital admissions rising steadily for weeks, according to Miami Herald calculations of CDC and Florida data.
In the seven days ended May 19, Florida’s health department reported 60,204 new cases. About 40% of the total were in South Florida, including 15,968 in Miami-Dade and 7,828 in Broward.
COVID hospital admissions also have continued to rise, with 2,157 inpatients reported in Florida or about 4% of all beds in use as of Tuesday, according to hospital usage data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
The CDC’s weekly assessment for each county, known as the COVID-19 Community Level, measures the number of new cases and hospital admissions and capacity to determine whether a community’s risk is low, medium or high. Guidance for individuals and state and local governments changes depending on the COVID-19 community level, with a “high” mark recommending indoor masking for everyone.
The CDC raised the level for Florida’s most populous counties, MiamiDade, Broward and Palm Beach, to its highest warning level on May 19 after the number of new COVID-19 cases and hospital admissions in the previous
seven days had exceeded the agency’s thresholds.
But the agency’s message was muddled by a data processing error that showed Miami-Dade and Broward with a “medium” level of risk, during which the CDC recommends that people with weakened immune systems and other high-risk medical conditions talk to their healthcare provider about the need to wear a mask and take other precautions.
The CDC advises that people can wear masks at any risk level and based on personal preference. People with symptoms, a positive test or exposure to someone with COVID-19 are also advised to wear a mask.
The agency reported the error in a footnote that Salemi noticed during his regular review of the CDC’s COVID-19 data for Florida.
Jasmine Reed, a CDC public affairs specialist, said the federal agency depends on voluntary reporting by states and local governments for data on COVID-19 conditions, which determine the community level for each county. The CDC updates
community levels each Thursday, but Reed did not provide an explanation for the error.
Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for the Florida Department of Health, said in an email that there was “an upload error” while providing data to the CDC on May 13, and that the state followed up with CDC on May 17 to provide the data again.
“The continuing problem is a data processing error on the CDC side,” he said.
NO MASK MANDATES
Regardless of the error, the CDC’s guidance for South Florida remains just that, a recommendation without the force of a mandate or law.
Miami-Dade’s and Broward’s mayors said they have no plans to issue an indoor mask mandate or any other requirements to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 in their communities. Leaders in both counties have adopted response plans that put the onus on individuals to take personal steps to protect themselves from the virus.
“I don’t support mask wearing indoors anymore,” said Broward Mayor Michael Udine. “I think we’re through that part of the pandemic. We’re going to have to learn to live with this in a careful way, and people are going to have to do what they need to do to protect themselves.”
Broward’s top administrators issued a memo in April citing CDC guidance and “strongly encouraging” face masks and social distancing on county property. But Udine said that with vaccines, COVID-19 therapeutics and an evolving scientific understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the pandemic is now more manageable and people are devoting less energy to it.
“We’ve learned how to deal with this,” he said. “People have taken the precautions they need to take. I feel we’re in a place now where we need to move forward as a society and be careful when someone needs to be careful. But I think we need to live life and we need to understand that COVID is here to stay.”
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava declined the Herald’s interview request but a spokeswoman said she is not considering changes to the county’s COVID-19 mitigation policy, called “Our BEST Plan” and focused on encouraging residents to get booster shots, stay home if they’re sick and get tested if they have symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath or new loss of taste or smell.
“The administration’s main priority is to keep encouraging residents to get vaccinated and boosted,” said Natalia Jaramillo, deputy communications director for the mayor’s office.
Cava, who received her second booster shot at a public event on May 20, acknowledged on the social media website, Twitter, that the county’s COVID-19 indicators were high but that serious illness and hospitalizations were low compared to previous surges.
With so many events taking place, public health experts say the risk of COVID-19 will vary by an individual’s immunity and medical condition and the setting.
Though the risk of catching or spreading COVID-19 outdoors is substantially lower than it would be indoors, Salemi said the warm weather is likely to cause many people to go indoors and cool off inside a bar, restaurant or nightclub where few are likely to be wearing a mask.
In those cases, Salemi said, people should seek places with good ventilation and circulation of air, such as open doors and windows, ceiling fans or air purifiers.
“If you’re in a densely crowded area with poor ventilation, that’s obviously a place where the virus is more easily going to pass from person to person,” he said. “The more ventilation you have, the more filtration of the air, the more you do things outdoors, those are all things that reduce your risk of getting infected with the virus or passing it to other people.”
Indoor nightclubs, bars and restaurants where crowds of people are eating and drinking, and singing and talking loudly, are the kinds of settings where COVID-19 is more likely to spread. And though many young and healthy people may not be at risk of severe illness, hospitalization or death, Salemi emphasized that wearing a mask indoors in public places and taking other measures to reduce the spread of viruses is as much about helping others as it is about protecting oneself.
He pointed to the experiences of past pandemic waves, particularly the delta surge during summer 2021 and the winter spike fueled by the omicron variant and its subvariants, when the number of new cases exploded and disrupted hospitals, police and fire departments, schools and other public institutions.
When community spread goes unmitigated in that way, Salemi said, the virus will find those who are most vulnerable — from the elderly in long-term care facilities to children who are too young to be vaccinated, to those with weakened immune systems and underlying chronic medical conditions.
Many of those individuals cannot protect themselves in the same way that most healthy people do, he said.
“There’s just still a lot of very vulnerable people in our community and it has not worked when we say let’s just protect the vulnerable,” Salemi said. “The delta surge really showed us that. When community spread went out of control, it found the vulnerable people and we ended up with 400 people dying every day during the worst of that surge.”
He urged Floridians and others to take “small steps” that collectively can help reduce community spread of the virus.
“I know I can take small but simple steps, still really be able to interact with the world around me in the same regard, and if that can help reduce spread and protect people around me, then that just seems like a win-win,” he said.
McWilliams of Cleveland Clinic Florida said visitors and residents alike should keep an eye on community spread as indicated by the CDC’s data tools, including the COVID-19 community level.
“You have to assess your own underlying risk and the risk to those who are around you,” she said.
YOU HAVE TO ASSESS YOUR OWN UNDERLYING RISK AND THE RISK TO THOSE WHO ARE AROUND YOU.
Dr. Carla McWilliams, chief of infectious diseases for Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston
A QUIET TEST SITE
As South Florida prepares for an influx of visitors and a celebration of events to honor those who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, a worker at a COVID-19 testing kiosk in North Miami provided a window into the public’s attitude toward the resurgent pandemic on Tuesday morning.
“There’s definitely a lot less people coming to get tested,” said Zackary Maldonado, 21, who administers COVID-19 tests at a Blue Med Consultants kiosk on Northeast 116th Street and Biscayne Boulevard. “I think people have stopped caring, to be honest.”
During the months leading up to December, Maldonado said, the kiosk saw about 100 people a day. That volume dropped to about 20 people per day in January but recently ticked up to about 40 daily customers, he said.
Most customers visiting the kiosk are getting tested at the kiosk in advance of traveling or because they need to show a negative result to return to work, he said.
With new cases and hospital admissions rising in South Florida, Maldonado said he advises clients to heed the CDC’s guidance, though he’s not always sure that they take his advice.
“People definitely should be wearing their masks, especially if cases are rising again,” he said. “But at the end of the day people are going to do what they want.”