"DeSantis for the win" - Live in Florida? Enjoy your dining. South Florida restaurant employees no longer require COVID-19 tests to return to work https://www.sun-sentinel.com/entert...0200807-bl44i4c6tjgzfig43qlpyyd2im-story.html Restaurant workers who test positive for COVID-19 can return to work sooner — and without testing negative — under an executive order signed Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Before that order, any restaurant employee who tested positive had to furnish employers with two negative COVID-19 tests before coming back to dining rooms. The relaxed guidelines now put the burden on restaurants to check for symptoms and decide when employees can return. “Restaurants are going to have to be more transparent than ever to make people feel safe,” says Diego Ng, co-owner of Temple Street Eatery in Fort Lauderdale, which posts its safety guidelines on social media to build trust among diners. Tim Petrillo isn’t about to stop testing employees at his 11 Fort Lauderdale bars, restaurants and clubs. Some of his properties include YOLO, Java & Jam and Spatch. “We’re not going to stop just because the state says so,” Petrillo says. “If you don’t require a COVID test to go back to work, and he turns out to be contagious, and he infects the entire staff, I’m not going to risk my business, my health or my employees’ health.” (More at above url)
Have eaten out at lunch all last week. Breakfast this morning. No issues and just yummy. Breakfast place was packed. Lunch not so much. So yes, we enjoy our dining.
At every briefing Governor Cooper emphasizes that COVID-19 is a critical public health situation and that we need to be cautious & realistic. At the briefings he has leading scientific advisors with him who present the facts -- rather than political fiction. Under Cooper's leadership North Carolina -- based on scientific facts -- remains in Phase 2 of the re-opening which has just been extended for another 5 weeks into September. Even some of the portions of Phase 2 have been rolled back based on the realities that state is facing with COVID. North Carolina has a face mask law and other laws in place to reduce the spread of COVID while keeping medical facilities open for elective surgery, restaurants open at 50% capacity, and one of the most realistic & flexible school re-opening plans in the nation. Our gyms are not opened. Our bars are not opened. We are only allowed to gather 10 people in an indoor space and 25 in an outdoor space. Our state tests COVID positive people before they are allowed to return to work. What are the results of implementing proper COVID policy base on science? North Carolina has half the population of Florida (10.5 Million versus 21.5 million). However we have only one quarter of COVID cases (135,000 versus 527,000) and one quarter of COVID deaths (2,184 versus 8,108). So the bottom line is that the COVID response in North Carolina has been much more effective than Florida -- and as each week goes on the gap just widens due to Florida's ineffective leadership.
Georgia can't even complete one week of school without many school districts completely shutting down their in-school learning due to large scale breakouts of COVID-19 -- yet here is DeSantis pimping that school sports are needed... Gov. DeSantis says it’s ‘critical’ to have sports for Florida students https://www.wflx.com/2020/08/06/gov...Vu167VYfIPoglzjD7w-AkPwYPpNajC0cs8wXly1uZAliA
Their education system is so horrible, many of their kids need baseball and football scholarships to get into a Florida state school haha
Cuomo rejects independent investigation of nursing home coronavirus deaths as political 'I think you’d have to be blind to realize it’s not political,' he said https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cuomo-coronavirus-nursing-home-independent-investigation New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday said “you’d have to be blind” to think calls to further calls to investigate the coronavirus deaths linked to state nursing homes amid the pandemic are “not political.” Cuomo, during a press conference Monday, said he “wouldn’t do an investigation” into the nursing home deaths during the coronavirus pandemic in the state of New York. “I wouldn’t do an investigation whether or not it’s political, everybody can make that decision for themselves,” Cuomo said. “I think you’d have to be blind to realize it’s not political.” He went on to say, “Just look at where it comes from and look at the sources and look at their political affiliations and look at who wrote the letter in Congress and look at what publications raise it and what media outward networks raise it.” He added: “It’s kind of incredible.” Cuomo has been insisting that the thousands of nursing home deaths had nothing to do with his March 25 order that required nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients who were medically stable without testing them, claiming that the deaths were caused by infected staff members who spread the virus. A report released last month backs up his claims, but experts have questioned the report’s methods. The report, released by New York State, said that 80 percent of the 310 nursing homes in the state that took coronavirus patients already had cases before Cuomo issued his order. Cuomo has blamed “dirty politics” for the accusations he has faced over his order, which he eventually rescinded on May 10. He said it was a “political conspiracy that the deaths in nursing homes were preventable.” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who is a leader of a House subcommittee on the COVID crisis, said in a letter to Cuomo last month that “lame-shifting, name-calling and half-baked data manipulations will not make the facts or the questions they raise go away.” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi responded, saying: “We’re used to Republicans denying science but now they are screeching about time, space and dates on a calendar to distract from the federal government’s many, many, embarrassing failures. No one is buying it.” Meanwhile, Cuomo on Monday urged the public to “look at the basic facts on where New York is versus other states.” “You look at where New York is as a percentage of nursing home deaths,” he said. “It’s all the way at the bottom of the list of states.” “So I don’t think anyone knows what’s political, what’s not political,” He continued. “Everyone can make their own decisions.” Cuomo went on to note that experts could “sensibly” investigate the coronavirus deaths in nursing homes in the state, and said that “would not be political at all,” and would be “trusted” by Democrats, Republicans and independents.
A hint for Florida --- here is a what a politician should do when they screw up the COVID data... California public health director abruptly resigns as state manages data snafu https://www.politico.com/states/cal...y-resigns-as-state-manages-data-snafu-9423839
As a Cuomo follow-up - it appears that New York's nursing home deaths is greatly under-counted since they only counted deaths that occurred in a nursing home, not deaths when some transported from a nursing home died in a hospital. New York’s true nursing home death toll cloaked in secrecy https://apnews.com/212ccd87924b6906053703a00514647f Riverdale Nursing Home in the Bronx appears, on paper, to have escaped the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, with an official state count of just four deaths in its 146-bed facility. The truth, according to the home, is far worse: 21 dead, most transported to hospitals before they succumbed. “It was a cascading effect,” administrator Emil Fuzayov recalled. “One after the other.” New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes, already among the highest in the nation, could actually be a significant undercount. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there. That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing a better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire. “That’s a problem, bro,” state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat, told New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker during a legislative hearing on nursing homes earlier this month. “It seems, sir, that in this case you are choosing to define it differently so that you can look better.” How big a difference could it make? Since May, federal regulators have required nursing homes to submit data on coronavirus deaths each week, whether or not residents died in the facility or at a hospital. Because the requirement came after the height of New York’s outbreak, the available data is relatively small. According to the federal data, roughly a fifth of the state’s homes reported resident deaths from early June to mid July — a tally of 323 dead, 65 percent higher than the state’s count of 195 during that time period. Even if half that undercount had held true from the start of the pandemic, that would translate into thousands more nursing home resident deaths than the state has acknowledged. Another group of numbers also suggests an undercount. State health department surveys show 21,000 nursing home beds are lying empty this year, 13,000 more than expected — an increase of almost double the official state nursing home death tally. While some of that increase can be attributed to fewer new admissions and people pulling their loved ones out, it suggests that many others who aren’t there anymore died. However flawed New York’s count, Cuomo has not been shy about comparing it to tallies in other states. Nearly every time Cuomo is questioned about New York’s nursing home death toll, he brushes off criticism as politically motivated and notes that his state’s percentage of nursing home deaths out of its overall COVID-19 death toll is around 20%, far less than Pennsylvania’s 68%, Massachusetts’ 64% and New Jersey’s 44%. “Look at the basic facts where New York is versus other states,” Cuomo said during a briefing Monday. “You look at where New York is as a percentage of nursing home deaths, it’s all the way at the bottom of the list.” In another briefing last month, he touted New York’s percentage ranking as 35th in the nation. “Go talk to 34 other states first. Go talk to the Republican states now — Florida, Texas, Arizona — ask them what is happening in nursing homes. It’s all politics.” Boston University geriatrics expert Thomas Perls said it doesn’t make sense that nursing home resident deaths as a percentage of total deaths in many nearby states are more than triple what was reported in New York. “Whatever the cause, there is no way New York could be truly at 20%,” Perls said. A running tally by The Associated Press shows that more than 68,200 residents and staff at nursing homes and long-term facilities across the nation have died from the coronarivus, out of more than 163,000 overall deaths. For all 43 states that break out nursing home data, resident deaths make up 44% of total COVID deaths in their states, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Assuming the same proportion held in New York, that would translate to more than 11,000 nursing home deaths. To be sure, comparing coronavirus deaths in nursing homes across states can be difficult because of the differences in how states conduct their counts. New York is among several states that include probable COVID-19 deaths as well as those confirmed by a test. Some states don’t count deaths from homes where fewer than five have died. Others don’t always give precise numbers, providing ranges instead. And all ultimately rely on the nursing homes themselves to provide the raw data. “Everybody is doing it however they feel like doing it. We don’t have very good data. It’s just all over the place, all over the country,” said Toby Edelman of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit representing nursing home residents. New York health chief Zucker explained during the legislative hearing that New York only counts deaths on the nursing home property to avoid “double-counting” deaths in both the home and the hospital. And while he acknowledged the state keeps a running count of nursing home resident deaths at hospitals, he declined to provide even a rough estimate to lawmakers. “I will not provide information that I have not ensured is absolutely accurate,” Zucker said. “This is too big an issue and it’s too serious an issue.” Zucker promised to provide lawmakers the numbers as soon as that doublechecking is complete. They are still waiting. The AP has also been denied access to similar nursing home death data despite filing a public records request with the state health department nearly three months ago. Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, said it is unethical of New York to not break out the deaths of nursing home residents at hospitals. “From an epidemiological and scientific perspective, there is absolutely no reason not to count them.” Nursing homes have become a particular sore point for the Cuomo administration, which has generally received praise for steps that flattened the curve of infections and New York’s highest-in-the-nation 32,781 overall deaths. But a controversial March 25 order to send recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals into nursing homes that was designed to free up hospital bed space at the height of the pandemic has drawn withering criticism from relatives and patient advocates who contend it accelerated nursing home outbreaks. Cuomo reversed the order under pressure in early May. And his health department later released an internal report that concluded asymptomatic nursing home staffers were the real spreaders of the virus, not the 6,300 recovering patients released from hospitals into nursing homes. But epidemiologists and academics derided the study for a flawed methodology that sidestepped key questions and relied on selective stats, including the state’s official death toll figures. “We’re trying to find out what worked and what didn’t work and that means trying to find patterns,” said Bill Hammond, who works on health policy for the nonprofit Empire Center think tank. “You can’t do that if you have the wrong data.”
Florida’s Covid-19 cases in children have increased 137% in past month https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-...11-20-intl/h_b3051e36396c23f34c0fd12cde1881c5 There has been a 137% increase in the number of Covid-19 cases in children age 17 and under in the past month in Florida, according to the state's department of health data. On July 9, Florida reported 16,797 cases in children. By Aug. 9, that number increased to 39,735 infections, per the Florida Department of Health. During that same time period hospitalizations jumped from 213 to 436, a 105% increase. Child deaths increased from 4 to 7 during the same time period. Florida’s percentage increase in Covid-19 infections in children in the past month is higher than the nationwide metric among US children. The state's latest figures come after a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association stated there was a 90% increase in Covid-19 cases among US children over the last four weeks. Some of the increase might be due to more testing, AAP said.