At least Cooper regularly states in his press conferences that COVID is a significant issue and the state is following a science based approach. Our state's COVID data is very transparent and double-checked by researchers at multiple universities.
"DeSantis for the win" --- let's reduce the cases by not testing. Atlas push to 'slow the testing down' tracks with dramatic decline in one key state https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/politics/atlas-desantis-testing-covid-florida/index.html Shortly after joining the White House as President Donald Trump's pandemic adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas launched a quiet effort that seemed counterintuitive to some of his colleagues -- encouraging officials to limit Covid-19 testing mainly to people experiencing symptoms. Atlas, a neuroradiologist, not an infectious disease expert, strongly supported a decision in August to revise federal guidelines to de-emphasize the need to test people without symptoms, according to two sources familiar with the process. He shared his view with state officials, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and several others in Florida, according to transcripts of public events and accounts from private meetings in that state. During a joint tour on August 31, Atlas and DeSantis urged public health officials in several Florida cities to focus less on universal testing and more on opening the economy and schools. In private and public meetings, according to transcripts and personal accounts, the two spoke in favor of testing people for Covid-19 primarily if they're experiencing symptoms, a controversial view among epidemiologists. "The purpose of testing is to stop people from dying," Atlas said during one stop, captured on video. "When you start introducing closure of schools because people have positive, asymptomatic tests, that's sort of not the purpose of testing." "I think, Dr. Atlas, we're in agreement on focusing strategies in school on people who are symptomatic," DeSantis said in another joint news conference that day. Their push to de-emphasize tests coincided with a dramatic drop in testing across Florida, even as the country was careening toward a fall coronavirus surge. A CNN analysis of the Florida state official numbers, aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project, shows that testing dropped off at the end of July and early August, with a peak seven-day average over 90,000 tests per day on July 18. Six weeks later, in early September, the seven-day average dropped by nearly half, with fewer than 48,000 tests per day, and hovered between there and 60,000 during the fall. If Atlas and DeSantis' advocacy in Florida is, in fact, responsible for the state's testing decrease, that would be in keeping with the wishes of Trump, who for months has falsely suggested that the US has so many coronavirus cases only because it conducts so many tests. In June, Trump even said publicly that he wanted to "slow the testing down, please." Though both Atlas and DeSantis declined to discuss their views with CNN for this story, they have articulated them in public. Some state and local officials believe the pair was influential in taking Trump's anti-testing pronouncements and helping to turn them into public policy. And the drop-off in testing is of deep concern to some. It took place as positivity rates remained high, in the range that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers indicative of high community spread. Asymptomatic Covid-19 carriers are still contagious, experts say. A lack of widespread testing makes it harder to map the disease as it spreads and to warn those at risk of illness. "There's no question more people are going to die," says Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a critic of DeSantis' approach to testing and other matters of the governor's pandemic management. "We are flying blind without tests." At the moment, the nation is experiencing another surge of illness. Daily case numbers are reaching levels not seen since late July, and Florida is starting to see its numbers go up as well. Experts say that widespread testing, including of asymptomatic carriers, is critical to limiting the spread of the virus. A White House spokesman claimed Atlas had never advocated reducing testing, despite the doctor's public statements to the contrary. Atlas and the President "are focused on using the massive testing program smartly, to save lives and protect individuals at risk in high-risk settings," Judd Deere wrote in an email to CNN. "The administration's testing strategy, and Dr. Atlas's advisement, is fundamentally rooted in the bedrock objective of saving lives, while helping schools, businesses, churches, and other institutions, to open, re-open, and stay open." A spokesperson for DeSantis said he is acting of his own accord. "We aren't marching lockstep with anybody," said Fred Piccolo, communications director for the governor. "We respect Dr. Atlas. But we have no marching orders from the White House." Atlas: From Fox commentator to trusted Trump adviser After advising the White House for several weeks, Atlas officially joined the Trump administration on August 10 at the request of the President. Trump had seen Atlas in interviews on Fox News, where he expressed skepticism about the scientific consensus on Covid-19. Among other things, Atlas had asserted that it doesn't matter "how many cases" there are in the US. His thoughts jibed with Trump's, and, upon announcing his hire, the President promised Atlas would "take it to a new level," suggesting Atlas would help the administration tackle the pandemic. Atlas quickly assumed the role of Trump's most favored public health adviser, supplanting more established members of the coronavirus task force such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. The President hardly ever asks doctors on the task force for their counsel anymore, White House officials have told CNN, relying instead on Atlas. "I definitely don't have his ear as much as Scott Atlas right now," Fauci said of Trump on MSNBC on Friday. "That has been a changing situation." John Cochrane, a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Atlas is a senior fellow, defended his colleague's willingness to push back against consensus. "Wise public policy has to balance a bit of disease spread against immense economic [and] social costs," said Cochrane, an economist. "I think that underlying insight drives much of his particular recommendations." One of Atlas' earliest moves as a member of the task force was to work to revise CDC guidelines in order to de-emphasize the need for asymptomatic testing, according to two sources familiar with the process. The advisory was later reversed because of the objections of CDC scientists, but the short-lived guidelines demonstrated Atlas' sway and helped him spread a message, including in Florida. DeSantis shares some Trump ideas about the pandemic Meanwhile, DeSantis has focused on similar things. Following Trump's demands in July that schools across the country reopen, the governor became a vocal proponent of returning Florida schools to normal operations. DeSantis supported an emergency order issued by his education commissioner in July that public schools should prepare to open five days a week for in-person learning, comparing schools to open retailers like Walmart and Home Depot. He also criticized some universities in the state for what he called "draconian" punishments for students who violated Covid-19 protocols. So it was notable that Atlas joined DeSantis in Florida during the first week of classes at the state's flagship public university, the University of Florida. Starting on August 31, the pair went across the state, promoting their shared ideas about the importance of reopening schools, focusing on protecting the elderly and not testing asymptomatic people. As the Republican governor of a crucial swing state, DeSantis had been presenting Florida's reopening at the end of September as a model of the President's view that life should return to normal quickly. "The point of all these things are to save lives," Atlas said in summing up his viewpoint at a news conference alongside DeSantis that same day, "not to document asymptomatic people that are low-risk." "I have been speaking with Gov. DeSantis for quite a while about the pandemic, and he really is an example of doing something with the exact thoughtful approach that we need in this," Atlas said later that day at a joint news conference in Tampa. During their joint tour, DeSantis and Atlas gave multiple news conferences and met privately with public health experts and officials to expound on their shared views. In one private meeting on August 31, DeSantis and Atlas told a room of health officials they shouldn't be testing college students without symptoms, according to one official who was present. "It was very clear that the governor was fully bought in on that idea and that we were essentially chastised," the official said of his personal impression from the meeting. The general tone, the person said, was like DeSantis had gone to Cape Canaveral and given a lecture on rocket science. It was like "so, let me tell you how it works," the source said. "First the fire comes out of the rocket, then the rocket blasts off, then the rocket reaches the blue part of the sky, then it reaches the black part of the sky, then it's in space." An aide to DeSantis said the governor is simply focused on protecting the vulnerable and reopening the economy. He believes that lockdowns are "a misguided and counterproductive strategy to defeating coronavirus," spokesman Piccolo said. Immunizing the herd The idea that asymptomatic people should not be tested is highly controversial among infectious disease experts. "There is no way to hide the pandemic by not testing," said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. "Even if we don't count the people who have mild or no symptoms, they still have it, and they're still infectious to others, and it will show up eventually." On the other hand, believers in a theory of "herd immunity" are less interested in universal testing. The White House and Atlas have spoken positively of the work of a group of infectious disease specialists who, in a statement called the Great Barrington Declaration, call for opening the economy and allowing rampant infection to create widespread immunity. In September, DeSantis appeared in a virtual public conference with two key authors of the declaration group, according to multiple local news accounts. The next day, he suddenly announced the complete reopening of the state, without restrictions for businesses or schools and no mask-wearing mandates. One mayor said he was not notified in advance, nor invited to public hearings. "Everybody was surprised," said Gelber, the Miami Beach mayor. "There had been no warning."
"DeSantis for the win" -- The State of Florida defunds all local Contact Tracing. Florida funding for vital COVID-19 contact tracing may be ending soon https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article246800262.html The director of the Palm Beach County health department made a startling public statement Tuesday: After Nov. 30, Florida will stop funding local efforts to trace new coronavirus infections. “We want to keep the contact tracing effective. We want to maintain those people that we have,” Alina Alonso said at a local county commission meeting. “Definitely a big concern for the entire state.” Contact tracing is a time-intensive investigative process used to get in touch with people who have come into contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. It’s been held up by Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees as “a way that we actually stop the cycle of transmission.” But Tuesday’s pronouncement from Alonso, the top health official in Florida’s third-largest county, raised questions about the future of the state’s contact tracing program — questions the state was not willing to fully answer. When asked whether the state would keep funding local contact tracing efforts after Nov. 30, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Emergency Management said officials will “work with” county health departments to make sure contact tracing efforts are funded. The spokesman, Jason Mahon, noted that local health funding comes from state, county and federal programs. The Palm Beach County department of health did not immediately respond to an email and phone call asking for comment. State has eased COVID-19 restrictions If Florida does stop paying for local contact tracing after Nov. 30, it would follow a pattern of behavior on the part of state leaders since the summer surge in cases began to fade in early September. Since then, Florida stopped mandating and paying for the testing of staff at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Gov. Ron DeSantis has allowed most businesses — including bars — to reopen fully, with no restrictions. And last week, the state eased restrictions on people visiting long-term care facilities. Few of the state’s policies have forbidden local governments or individual businesses from taking precautions. Many businesses across the state are still limiting indoor service; the federal government has started to pay for the testing of nursing home staff. County health departments will continue to perform contact tracing, Mahon said. But most all of the state’s recent actions have transferred responsibility for preventing outbreaks from state government officials to localities and individuals. When DeSantis announced reopening, he pointed to improving indicators — fewer cases, hospitalizations and lower positivity rates. But in the past week, Florida has seen cases and hospitalizations rise, a nationwide pattern pointing to another possible surge. That means now isn’t the time to pull back on contact tracing efforts, said Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, the chair of Florida International University’s Department of Epidemiology. Trepka said with Florida open and little social distancing in place, contact tracing is one of the few strategies left to control the virus, along with testing and asking people to do their part. “If you start cutting that program now it’s going to be very hard to restart again, and it is a really important part of controlling COVID,” Trepka said. Has Florida contact tracing been effective? In late May, the state began to contract its tracing efforts out to a company, Maximus, which said in an email that it currently has 1,100 people working to trace new infections. To date, the state has paid that firm between $65 million and $70 million, a Maximus spokeswoman said. Hundreds of Florida’s contact tracers have also come from medical schools, including the University of Florida. Representatives from the Department of Health started recruiting students in the spring. But in mid-July, they stopped calling, said Dr. Michael Lauzardo, director of UF’s in-house contact tracing program. He isn’t sure why. Specifics of the agreement with Maximus have been “obscured” by the state, Lauzardo added. Contact tracing “became a very nebulous kind of process” when the company came in. Potential funding cuts would further weaken local health departments’ efforts, Lauzardo said. Municipalities would have to draw from their own budgets to continue pursuing this vital public health work, he said. The threat of a funding shortfall is all the greater as governments run out of the money they got through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, passed in March. Even with state funding, contact tracing efforts have fallen short in Florida all along, Lauzardo said — in the face of evidence that the practice helps slow the spread of disease. “We are in an age where people don’t listen to experts and where policy is divorced from expertise,” he said. “When you don’t look at the data and the science, there’s a price to pay.” Lauzardo called contact tracing “a basic public health function,” comparing it to access to clean drinking water. Pushing its financial burden onto localities is as absurd as asking individual neighborhoods to purify their own water so the city or county doesn’t have to, he said. “There is no debate among any public health experts anywhere that contact tracing is not worth doing,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of value in it and it’s not something to be given up on. That’s a fatalistic and cowardly way to look at this.” Hiring and training contact tracers takes weeks, Trepka said. During Florida’s summer surge, casework swamped the department of health as they rushed to get contact tracers in place. A survey from NPR and Johns Hopkins University estimates Florida needs about 8,761 contact tracers but has 4,400 working. Little else is known about the state’s contact tracing program. The state doesn’t readily report the size of its contact tracing workforce, how many cases it has attempted to reach and how many were reached successfully. When asked questions about these figures, Mahon did not respond. Some reports have highlighted that Florida’s contact tracing efforts hit road blocks along the way — including calls being flagged as spam, according to the Miami Herald, and many of those infected going without ever receiving a call, according to CNN. A herd immunity strategy? From the beginning of the pandemic, public health experts have emphasized testing, tracing and distancing. But with fewer safeguards remaining, personal responsibility could become more important. To some health experts, that begs the question: Could herd immunity make a difference? To reach a level of herd immunity, anywhere from about 8,000 to 14,000 more people would have to die in Miami-Dade County alone, Trepka said. And that would be for a strategy scientists aren’t confident in. They don’t know for sure how long coronavirus immunity lasts, and, in multiple documented cases, people infected with the coronavirus became re-infected with another strain. “We don’t even know that if we go through that whole sacrifice if people would be immune on a long-term basis or not,” Trepka said. Later, she added, “Until we have a vaccine, we have essentially social distancing, contact tracing, mask wearing, hand washing, and that’s about it.”
Yes, you've said that. And again, the people dying probably feel much better dying with this in mind.
Contact Tracing is one of the very public health foundations of stopping highly infectious diseases from spreading. The State of Florida will stop funding any of it. Let's see what the Tampa Bay Times has to say... Will Florida keep funding local coronavirus contact tracing? The state won’t say. Questions arise after a Palm Beach health official says Florida will stop the funding, which helps keep the virus in check. https://www.tampabay.com/news/healt...ronavirus-contact-tracing-the-state-wont-say/
"DeSantis for the win" -- Let's see how the long-haulers in the Tampa area are dealing with COVID... Long-haulers: Tampa Bay residents can’t shake COVID-19 symptoms months later They survived the coronavirus, but they’re still struggling with strange symptoms they never expected. https://www.tampabay.com/news/healt...ts-cant-shake-covid-19-symptoms-months-later/ Greg Branch not only achieved his dream of becoming a pilot, he had one of the best gigs in the industry. For 13 years, he flew pro athletes, famous musicians and CEOs of major companies around the world on private jets. “Sometimes, it was just wealthy retirees who’d fly to Canada for lunch,” said Branch, 37. “You don’t ask why, but you learn a lot from talking to them. Every day is something different.” Every day now, he said, is pretty much the same. Headaches, confusion and fatigue that can make a walk to the kitchen feel as draining as running a mile uphill. Unable to fly, Branch and his wife left West Palm Beach and moved into a home in Tampa owned by her parents. It all started in June. Casinos reopened. Branch flew clients to Las Vegas. He had a night off and decided to do a little gambling. “Nobody was wearing a mask,” he said. “I didn’t wear one. I wasn’t taking it seriously.” His senses of taste and smell vanished a week later, and he had a mild cough. He tested positive for COVID-19. But that was as bad as it got in the first couple weeks. He expected to be back in the air within a month. “I was in good shape. You have to be pretty healthy to fly.” Plus, everything he had heard about COVID-19 said recovery would take a week or two. But as the weeks went by, new symptoms appeared. When he and his wife went out on their boat, he felt so tired he could hardly hold his fishing pole. Branch, like tens of thousands of others, describes himself as a COVID-19 “long-hauler.” The term, which arose as the long-haulers found each other and banded together online, describes people who survive the disease but experience an array of lingering symptoms. A small but growing body of research suggests as many as one in 10 people who get COVID-19 may fall into the long-hauler category. More than four months later, small chores wipe Branch out. He helped hang a TV on a wall at home recently. “That crashed me for two days,” he said. He gets wobbly and everything aches. His heart races out of nowhere, he said, and has approached 180 beats per minute while sitting still at his computer. The worst is the “brain fog” that makes it hard to speak and causes memory gaps. “I was driving to physical therapy, and I got pulled over,” Branch said. “The officer said, ‘Do you realize you ran a red light?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’ I had no memory of even going through a light.” Another time he drove to an appointment a mile from home and couldn’t figure out how to get back. His wife drives him places now. The most high-profile mention of long-haulers yet came recently when Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke on 60 Minutes of a “significant number” of COVID-19 survivors who have fatigue or brain fog for months “or possibly longer.” Fauci has said that, anecdotally, their symptoms suggest myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, which can be a decades-long illness brought on by viral infections. Dr. Elimarys Perez-Colon is a professor at the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine and medical director for the COVID-19 Confirmed (CoCo) Clinic at Tampa General Hospital. She said lung damage and heart failure are the “concrete” issues patients are dealing with post-COVID-19, but “we’re also seeing all these symptoms that we don’t have quite a good understanding or explanation for yet.” They include lingering shortness of breath, chest and joint pain and the inability to return to a formerly active lifestyle due to extreme fatigue. “How we treat those patients will be a major issue in the future.” Many long-haulers say they have felt dismissed by doctors or frustrated by suggestions their symptoms could be anxiety or stress. But as time goes by and their numbers grow, physicians are seeing an undeniable pattern. Tests often come back normal, but the symptoms are real. “The best we can tell (patients) now,” Perez-Colon said, "is I definitely believe you’re having these symptoms, but I don’t have an answer for you yet. We’re working on getting those answers, but that is going to take time. “In a year or two from now, if we’re discussing in medical schools all over the world some kind of a post-COVID syndrome, none of us will be surprised.” Dr. John T. Sinnott, chairman of internal medicine at USF’s college of medicine, said he can’t help but think of his experience traveling to Asia in 2004 to study patients infected by SARS-CoV-1, another coronavirus. “When we sent those patients home, we thought they were well,” he said. “In five years, when I returned, about 15 percent had chronic lung problems, 12 percent needed one or both hips replaced and 8 percent were physically weak or needed walkers.” Dr. Seetha Lakshmi, a USF professor and infectious disease specialist who has treated COVID-19 patients at Tampa General, said the long-haulers should be a warning to avoid becoming infected in the first place. “Young people out there who don’t think this will damage them short-term, you have no idea long-term,” she said. Many long-haulers have mild initial symptoms and don’t require hospitalization. Sometimes, they’re never even tested, which can complicate things later on when they have no definitive record of having had COVID-19. Some have found reassurance, if not relief, in Facebook groups like Survivor Corps, where more than 100,000 members compare symptoms and trade stories about their treatments. “It was really just comforting to finally find other people like me and to realize, you know, I’m not crazy,” said Marcus Tomoff, 28, who created a Facebook group called Florida Longhaulers. TheTampa Bay Times spoke to seven Tampa Bay residents from the group who described ongoing issues after thinking they’d recovered. Some tested positive as far back as March. Only one had been hospitalized around the time they first started showing symptoms. Tomoff said he had to leave his jobs working in a Tampa restaurant and a nightclub in June, and has struggled for more than four months with chest pain that repeatedly sends him to the emergency room. He recently returned to some light duty at work, but was in the emergency department at Memorial Hospital as recently as Oct. 19. He can no longer handle the long bike rides on Bayshore Boulevard that he used to take because he gets exhausted easily and has trouble walking. “He’s 27, but walks like an old man,” said Tomoff’s stepfather Mitchel Banks, 62, who was also infected in June but has no lingering symptoms. “He’s lost 10 or 15 pounds, and he was already skinny.” Stacey Kelch, 36, described finding the long-hauler support groups on Facebook as “almost likeThe Twilight Zone,” because of how eerily similar other people’s symptoms were to her own. “All the sudden, you’re seeing yourself after feeling like you couldn’t get any information.” Before contracting COVID-19 in June, Kelch worked as a bartender at the Castle and the Boneyard in Ybor City. She went to the emergency room twice in October. The first time was after she blacked out and woke up on the floor to her dog, Lucy, licking her. The second was after her blood pressure plummeted and her pulse raced to 160 and wouldn’t come down. Tests from that last visit showed an enlargement of the right ventricle of her heart. Kelch said she had no health issues prior to COVID-19. She now has frequent rashes, fevers and headaches, and becomes exhausted easily. She can’t work and can no longer read to pass the time. Kelch’s girlfriend, Sheri Shuttleworth, said Kelch was a speed reader. She once saw Kelch finish George R.R. Martin’s first three books in the Game of Thrones series in only a few days. That’s around 800,000 words. “Now I have to read the same paragraph, over and over, 15 times to comprehend it,” Kelch said. Specialized post-COVID clinics opened in recent months around the U.S., mostly at teaching hospitals. The clinic at Mount Sinai in New York City was one of the first, followed by Penn Medicine’s clinic in Philadelphia, Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, the Stanford University Medical Center, the University of California-San Francisco and others. They’re bringing physicians with different specialties — cardiologists, pulmonologists, neurologists — together and incorporating speech therapy, physical therapy and psychology. In the United Kingdom, where long-haulers' symptoms are referred to as “long covid,” the National Health Service announced on Oct. 7 a plan to open long covid clinics in every area across England, a recognition that medicine could be reckoning with the effects of the virus long into the future. The NHS specifically noted that it will include people who have had COVID but who may not have had a hospital admission or a previous positive test. There are no such clinics in Florida yet. “Treating these patients will cost a lot of health care dollars,” Perez-Colon said. Perez-Colon said theCoCo Clinic could be folded into USF’s new Global Emerging Diseases Institute and transition into a clinic more focused on “long-haulers” who may or may not have been hospitalized with COVID-19. The CoCo clinic has so far focused mostly on telemedicine and currently follows patients who were already treated for confirmed cases within the USF or TGH systems. She said the new institute will have many lines of funding through research grants and that an expanded CoCo Clinic is being proposed as part of that project. Branch, the pilot, said that for now, he feels somewhat lucky to have found a general practitioner who listens and acknowledges that he is dealing with chronic COVID-19, even if all they can do is treat the symptoms and refer him to specialists. He said the more frustrating part is having his health and career ripped away due to an illness that he believes many people still think is fake. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to fly again. The intense medical approval process with the Federal Aviation Authority, once he’s ready, feels daunting. “It makes me want to scream when I see people without a mask,” he said. “If people knew what this feels like, they’d take it seriously.”