Faster COVID testing needed, DeSantis says, in talking at Jackson about rise in cases

Gov. Ron DeSantis acknowledged on Monday that Floridians are not getting their coronavirus test results fast enough.

“There’s a need for faster results,” DeSantis said at a news conference at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital. “When people go through, a lot of times they’re not getting their results back for seven days. Obviously we want to improve that.”

DeSantis said the state would add dedicated “symptomatic” lanes at drive-through testing sites for potentially infected residents in South Florida to get more rapid tests.

During the news conference, which was interrupted by heckling, DeSantis took on a somber tone as he described the challenges facing the parts of the state where the coronavirus outbreak has hit hardest. South Florida, the governor noted, is the pandemic’s epicenter in the state.

In Miami-Dade County, hospital rooms are filling with coronavirus patients, although officials there noted there is still space for future patients. Jackson once again stopped elective surgeries in order to have more capacity and staffing to care for COVID patients.

Carlos Migoya, president and CEO of Jackson Health System, noted that the spread was originally driven by young Floridians. But now, the outbreak is reaching more vulnerable older residents.

“The younger people have been contaminating the older people,” Migoya said.

Still, DeSantis reiterated there are reasons to be optimistic in the state.

Earlier in the day, he tweeted a video of Charles Lockwood, the dean of Tampa’s University of South Florida Health’s Morsani College of Medicine, laying out the reasons why the recent spike in cases may not be cause for as much alarm as the raw numbers might indicate.

Lockwood noted that coronavirus treatments have improved and that the state has much more emergency hospital capacity than it had at the beginning of the pandemic. He also noted the percentage of positive tests has decreased in recent days in the state.

“We seem to have peaked about a week ago in the emergency department visits for COVID-like illnesses,” Lockwood said in an interview broadcast on CNN.

This story was originally published July 13, 2020 at 6:36 PM.