After days of protests, area curfews also lifted

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings expressed frustration Monday at the short-lived roll out of a program for people to apply for coronavirus relief funds as local officials said they continued to monitor an increase in cases of the virus.

Demings and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer also announced at a Monday evening briefing an end to local curfews at 8 p.m. in a core part of downtown and 10 p.m. elsewhere after days of growing, but peaceful protests calling for an end to racism and police brutality after the death of George Floyd.

Demings said he will reopen the application process for people in need of financial assistance after the program stopped taking applications just 10 minutes after it opened Monday morning when it reached a 2,000-person limit.

Demings said the program will now accept as many as 20,000 applications for the $1,000 in funds available to families who have suffered job losses or other hardships brought by the pan

demic.

“I’d want to know in advance that I’m in the hopper,” Demings said. “Our goal is to help as many of those families as we can with the dollars we have.”

The funds are part of Orange’s share of a federal relief package.

But even as the county prepares to hand out those checks, new cases of the virus are on the rise. Orange County saw an increase in the number of case each of the past four weeks, though that’s also the result of both wider testing, and more precise testing, a health official said. About 2.9% of tests in Orange County come back positive.

County officials experienced a rush for aid in the early days of the pandemic when an earlier rental assistance program was overwhelmed in March by residents seeking up to $1,200 in crisis aid. So they expected a crush of applicants for a share of the $36.5 million set aside for the latest program known as the Individual and Family Assistance Program, which is outlined in detail on the website ocfl.net/orangecares.

The county is still taking applications for its Small Business Grant Program, expected to help 6,500 qualifying small businesses with $10,000 grants.

Dr. Raul Pino, officer for the Florida Department of Health in Orange County, said the numbers are also affected by a strategy of testing potential outbreaks. He said the county recently found an outbreak at a mattress factory which prompted officials to test 300 people with 77 or about 25% positive. The factory voluntarily closed, he said.

The Orange County Jail also reported its first inmate with the virus, though he was known to be positive before arriving from a state prison. He informed corrections officials that he tested positive, though he did not show any symptoms.

Demings was unclear why the potentially contagious man was transferred to the jail, but said the inmate had served his state sentence and the county had a warrant for his arrest on charges involving a firearm. He’s being isolated at the jail in a negative airflow cell.

“We want to do the best we can to make sure that jail is COVID-19 free,” Demings said.

Both Demings and Dyer said they decided to lift the curfews in part because the demonstrations in response to Floyd’s death were mostly peaceful. The 46-year-old man, who was black, died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than 8 minutes.

Some protesters have called for “defunding” law enforcement agencies as one answer to concerns over racism and police brutality. But Dyer and Demings, a former police chief and sheriff, said they were not considering such an action.

“Police presence is important. I couldn’t think of going a day without having police officers in our neighborhoods,” Dyer said.