Coronavirus live updates: Here’s what to know in South Florida on July 20
We’re keeping track of the latest news regarding the coronavirus in South Florida and around the state. Check back for updates throughout the day.
‘There is no vaccine for death’: Vigil held for ICE detainee who died of COVID-19
6:45 p.m.: Onoval Perez-Montufar was the kind of detainee who always offered to share his meals, his cellmates say.
His niece described him as a caring father who could make “anyone in the room laugh.”
“Yes, he was generous, kind and funny, but he was also very scared,” one fellow detainee told the Miami Herald in a phone interview Monday.
“He was scared of dying. And look, his fear came true.” He paused and tried to control his tears: “Any of us can be next.”
Perez-Montufar, a Mexican national who was being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Glades County Detention Center in remote Moore Haven, just west of Lake Okeechobee, died July 11 of COVID-19. He was the first reported ICE detainee in Florida and the third in the country to die of the novel virus. He was 51.
Read the full story here.
Industry executives say Florida’s nursing homes face ‘category 5 emergency’
6:30 p.m.: As state officials focused their attention for the last three weeks on the rising COVID-19 case numbers among younger Floridians, the number of infected residents and staff at elder care facilities has more than doubled and on Monday, the trade association for nonprofit nursing homes unleashed a cry for help.
“For months we have been sending out a warning to the federal government that this crisis is not over,’’ said Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO of LeadingAge which represents 5,000 nonprofit nursing homes and assisted living facilities, on a teleconference with reporters Monday. “We need real solutions now, not a patchwork of policies that allow the pandemic to grow more deadly and dangerous.”
She called the rising case numbers a “category five-level emergency bearing down on millions of older adults in Florida and across the United States,’’ and urged Congress to reject President Trump’s call to block funding for states that invest in more testing and contact tracing.
Read the full story here.
Florida’s teachers union sues DeSantis, Corcoran over schools’ ‘reckless, unsafe reopening’
6 p.m.: Florida’s top teachers’ union, joined by local educators — including one from Miami-Dade County — sued Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state education commissioner Monday to stop the “reckless and unsafe reopening of schools” this fall amid Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases.
The Florida Education Association was joined by plaintiffs who are educators in Miami-Dade, Broward and Orange counties, in the suit, filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court.
The Miami-Dade plaintiff, Mindy Grimes Festge, is the secretary/treasurer of the United Teachers of Dade. She and her husband, Don, have been educators for 28 years. They have a son, who is a rising high school senior with a compromised immune system and unable to return to school during the pandemic.
Read the full story here.
Will lobster miniseason be canceled in the Keys due to COVID? Leaders to meet on issue
5 p.m.: Monroe County’s mayor has called an emergency commission meeting for 9 a.m. Tuesday to consider adding new restrictions as the number of COVID-19 cases rise in the Florida Keys.
One pressing issue: whether to ask the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to cancel spiny lobster miniseason nine days before it is scheduled to start.
“We need to do everything possible we can to prevent people from congregating in crowds,” said County Mayor Heather Carruthers, of Key West. “I don’t know what my other commissioners are going to say. We’ve had this conversation before.”
Read the full story here.
The world ran out of bicycles because of COVID-19. But this Miami shop is thriving
4: 30 p.m.: It’s bigger even than toilet paper: Who could have predicted that the humble bicycle would become one of the hottest -- and scarcest -- commodities in a grim pandemic?
Certainly not Marcelo Penengo, owner of Elite Cycling, a small bike shop on U.S. 1 just north of The Falls. Just three months ago, bike stores in Miami-Dade County were ordered shut down as nonessential businesses as the novel coronavirus began its relentless spread. Penengo thought the epidemic would spell doom for his business and his half-dozen employees.
But so many people stuck at home have discovered -- or re-discovered -- the joys and benefits of riding a bicycle that shops around the nation are in the midst of a boom the likes of which have not been seen since the 10-speed craze of the 1970s.
Read the full story here.
South Florida airports say state stopped screening Tri-state flights for quarantine
3:45 p.m.: South Florida’s largest commercial airports say the Florida Department of Health has stopped enforcing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ order requiring travelers from Connecticut, New Jersey and New York to quarantine for 14 days after arriving in the state.
The order, first put in place on March 23, when the northeast was the epicenter of the pandemic, was meant to curb the spread of COVID-19 by isolating people coming into Florida from known virus hot spots. The Florida National Guard and Florida Department of Health staff members began boarding and greeting arriving flights at South Florida airports to collect contact information from travelers and hand out forms with instructions to quarantine.
Travelers who did not quarantine were threatened with jail time.
But starting the last week in June, state staff members stopped showing up at the airports to meet travelers and have them fill out screening forms, ending enforcement of the order, spokesmen for Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport confirmed.
Read the full story here.
Recently recovered from COVID-19? Hospitals desperately need your blood, DeSantis says
3 p.m.: Gov. Ron DeSantis Monday urged Floridians who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate blood so that their convalescent plasma can be used in treating sick patients across the state.
“So many Floridians have asked what else can I do to be helpful in the fight against COVID-19?” DeSantis said at a press conference at blood donation company OneBlood’s headquarters in Orlando.
OneBlood CEO and Sunny Isles Beach Mayor George “Bud” Scholl said Monday that there is a 500% increase in demand from hospitals for convalescent plasma.
Florida adds more than 10,000 coronavirus cases as state total climbs past 360,300
12:07 p.m.: Florida’s Department of Health on Monday confirmed 10,347 additional new cases of COVID-19, bringing the state’s total to 360,394 known cases. There were also 90 new Florida resident deaths announced, bringing the statewide resident death toll to 5,072.
Two new non-resident deaths were announced in the state, bringing the non-resident death toll to 111.
Read the full story here.
‘Sleeping in a ball of sweat’: As COVID-19 stalks Florida’s inmates, so does another plague
10:15 a.m.: “They are dying in the heat,” said the distraught mother of an inmate at Dade Correctional Institution south of Miami. “What have we done to deserve this. … How is it possible, knowing how hot it is here?”
“We have gone an entire week without a set of showers — two were turned off last week because one of them wouldn’t turn off, so they just turned the water off and have not been back to fix it,” wrote an inmate at Avon Park Correctional Institution, a prison in Highlands County, in an email shared with the Miami Herald.
“Plus the water temp is too hot to stand under and they won’t turn it down.”As temperatures in Florida soar into the 90s, accounts by inmates and their loved ones, shared with the Herald on condition of anonymity, provide a glimpse of the condition of inmates housed in overcrowded prisons without proper ventilation.
Despite the state being among the hottest in the country, only 18 of its 50 prisons have air-conditioning. Every summer the sweltering and squalid heat increases health risks and raises tensions between officers and inmates.
But this year inmates are fighting a battle on another front: COVID-19.
Bahamas closes borders to U.S. tourists after COVID-19 cases spike
10 a.m.: Less than three weeks after reopening its borders to international visitors, the Bahamas on Sunday announced that it is closing all of its airports and seaports to tourists from the United States, effective Wednesday.
Bahamasair, the country’s national carrier, will cease all outgoing flights to the United States immediately, Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said in a national address Sunday.
Outgoing commercial flights will still be permitted to accommodate visitors scheduled to leave the Bahamas after Wednesday, he said.
Read the full story here.
CATCH UP TO START THE DAY
10 a.m.: Here are the coronavirus headlines to catch you up on what’s happening around South Florida and the state as Monday begins.
▪ Almost 12,500 COVID-19 cases added in Florida. The state’s death toll is over 5,000
▪ More restrictions announced in Florida Keys as COVID-19 cases rise
▪ Prominent Miami Dolphin joins star players’ coordinated COVID-19 blitz against NFL
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 10:09 AM with the headline "Coronavirus live updates: Here’s what to know in South Florida on July 20."
