Miami-Dade to open more test sites, require masks in county buildings as omicron surges
Amid a surge in coronavirus cases across Miami-Dade County and the United States, County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced new public health protocols Wednesday and urged residents to take safety precautions against the highly contagious omicron variant.
Masks will be required in county buildings starting Wednesday, the mayor said, bringing back a restriction she put in place during the surge of the delta variant in July that was lifted on Nov. 5.
She also urged people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and to receive booster shots, which research shows are helpful protection against omicron.
“We have seen this omicron variant rapidly spreading like wildfire,” Levine Cava said. “We will come through this latest surge and make sure we can enter the new year as strong as ever. We know that getting vaccinated and boosted is the single-most important thing we can do. These vaccines work.”
Levine Cava urged families planning Christmas celebrations to take advantage of the cool weather and consider gathering outdoors to prevent infection.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the largest single-day increase in COVID-19 cases for Florida since Sept. 21.
In response to a near 200% increase in demand, county COVID-19 testing locations will also expand hours and locations. The new locations will be announced “soon,” Levine Cava said at a news conference outside the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. The county has also received “several thousand” at-home test kits from the federal government, which will soon be distributed to residents.
Nomi Health, the provider partnering with Miami-Dade at the county sites, has said it has enough staff to accommodate expanded locations and hours, and will be open for testing at all sites until 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Christmas Day.
The county is testing anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 people per day, Levine Cava said.
Levine Cava has started reinstating other county rules that were shed over the fall. Now, the county is back to requiring hospitals to resume daily reports on COVID patient counts and ICU bed availability, deploying mobile vaccination trucks and sequencing for variants at county-run testing sites.
The highly contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus is now the predominant strain of the coronavirus circulating in Miami-Dade and the United States. On Monday, Miami-Dade officials reported that the omicron variant had been detected in 76% of 504 COVID-19 test samples taken on Dec. 14-15, up from from 1.3% of 373 samples collected Dec. 1-5. The CDC announced that the strain, which was first identified in November in South Africa, now accounts for 73% of cases in the United States.
On Tuesday, Levine Cava urged the state’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, to help ensure that Miami-Dade receives monoclonal antibody therapies now that cases are rising rapidly and the positivity rate of COVID-19 tests indicate a high rate of transmission.
As of Wednesday, she said she had not received a response.
State-run monoclonal antibody treatment sites in Miami-Dade and Broward were forced to temporarily close on Tuesday after running out of supplies. The site at Tropical Park is back online, Levine Cava said, though it is only administering 80 doses per day to people with a positive COVID-19 test, symptoms and an appointment. Before the shortage, the site was giving out 400 doses per day.
The Tropical Park site has enough supply to continue administering doses through Sunday.
Levine Cava said the antibody treatments are more common in Florida than in other places because of early access and messaging from Gov. Ron. DeSantis that the treatments are “an alternative to vaccinations.”
“It is not an alternative,” Levine Cava said, urging unvaccinated residents to get a shot.
There were 1,849 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Florida and 299 in intensive care units, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services report on Wednesday. This data is reported from 230 Florida hospitals. The total number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were 206 more than in Tuesday’s report, when 234 hospitals reported.
Herald staff writer Daniel Chang contributed to this report.
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 12:11 PM.