As Florida COVID cases rise among younger people, DeSantis says state has hospital beds
As Florida reported another record day of new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday, with 3,822, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back against suggestions that the state may become the next epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus pandemic and that it’s quickly running out of hospital beds to care for patients.
At a news conference in Miami with local hospital executives and state and local leaders, DeSantis said that most of the state’s new cases have been found among younger people with milder symptoms and insisted that Florida has plenty of hospital beds available.
“A lot of the people who are testing positive now are not symptomatic,” he said.
DeSantis said the state has also ramped up testing of residents and staff at Florida nursing homes and assisted living facilities, requiring testing every two weeks for every staff member of a long-term care facility in the state.
“That will help us prevent the introduction of this virus into those facilities,” he said.
When it comes to hospital beds, the governor said the state has “twice as much capacity in the hospitals throughout the state of Florida today than before the pandemic began and that’s with having elective surgeries, which have been going on since the beginning of March [actually May].”
Mary Mayhew, secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates hospitals, accused the news media of overlooking the ability for hospitals to boost the number of staffed beds to handle a surge of patients.
“Our hospitals have an incredible ability to rapidly increase their capacity,” she said. “That is often overlooked by the media as they focus on current capacity.”
But the agency’s statewide hospital bed dashboard provides the data that national media have cited when reporting that Florida’s hospitals are running out of room at the same time that the state is reporting record numbers of new COVID-19 cases. The dashboard does not reflect hospitals’ ability to boost capacity.
Mayhew said there are more than 15,000 hospital beds currently unfilled statewide, which equals 25% below capacity — the same number reported by the agency’s dashboard.
“The trends are absolutely favorable,” Mayhew said. “The acuity is down.”
All three of the South Florida hospital executives at the event with DeSantis supported his assertion that hospitals are seeing a lower severity of COVID-19 patients and that they have the ability to handle a surge.
Aurelio Fernandez, CEO of Memorial Healthcare System, the public hospital system for South Broward, said the hospital network saw its peak of COVID-19 patients in April and had since seen a significant decline.
“To only have 14 patients with only 11 ventilators is way improved,” he said.
At Jackson Health System, Miami-Dade’s public hospital network, intensive care beds are filled with patients who have had organ transplants, neurosurgery and other complex surgeries as well as patients with COVID-19.
Jackson Health CEO Carlos Migoya said about 10% of the hospital system’s beds are filled with COVID-19 patients, and that those patients are isolated from all others.
“Today, we have 150 COVID patients, of which 45 of them are in intensive care beds,” Migoya said. “I will tell you that … if we were to double that number [of COVID-19 patients], we would still have beds available today.”
But public health experts worry that Florida’s case counts will continue to rise as the state moves forward with reopening, placing more stress on hospitals.
“While it’s good that the hospitals feel like they have the bed capacity to cope with a surge of cases right now, I worry that this capacity is going to be tested over the coming weeks if COVID-19 spread continues unchecked,” Dr. Yonatan Grad, a physician and professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an email.
Grad said mortality rates are much lower for young people, but emphasized that the risk is not zero.
“Young people can still suffer severe manifestations of infection and die from COVID-19,” he said.
The median age of Floridians with COVID-19 is lowering, DeSantis said at Friday’s news conference. The average age of individuals testing positive in June is 37, he said. In March, it was 65 1/2.
A lower age equates to lower morbidity, he pointed out, noting that 85% of COVID-19 related deaths are of people 65 or older. He also pointed out that the bulk of the deaths have happened in Florida’s assisted living facilities and nursing homes.
“It’s important for people to understand that a lot of the people testing positive are not symptomatic,” he said at the news conference, which was held at Florida International University’s Tamiami campus.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who also spoke, said young people think that because “it doesn’t really hurt them, they don’t have to wear the mask.”
“But you can take it home to your parents and your grandparents,” he said.
Gimenez said the county still has nearly 2,700 hospital beds available “with the ability to put another 1,200 in operation relatively quickly.”
Miami-Dade has had the highest number of COVID-19 cases reported among any county in the state. It’s also the only county whose mayor requires local hospitals to report COVID-19 patient admissions, discharges, bed and ventilator availability every day.
Gimenez said the county had more than 440 intensive care beds available on Friday and the ability to add 526 more. With 644 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Miami-Dade, including 121 in intensive care, Gimenez said, “None of these numbers are alarming.”
DeSantis has not issued a statewide mandatory face mask order, though some local governments have done so, including those in the Florida Keys, Miami Beach, Tampa and all of Orange County. Miami-Dade has not implemented such an order, though Gimenez said local police and code enforcement officers will be monitoring businesses and public spaces to ensure people are following social distancing guidelines.
“We’re going to be cracking down,” Gimenez said.
The Florida Medical Association, the state’s largest and most politically influential physicians group, wants local governments to do more than crack down on social distancing, though.
On Friday, the group’s president issued a statement urging Floridians to use face masks to reduce spread of COVID-19, and calling on local officials to adopt regulations requiring face masks in public places.
“The science is clear,” said Ronald F. Giffler, the FMA president and Pompano Beach physician. “Asymptomatic infected individuals can release infectious aerosol particles while breathing and speaking. Not wearing a mask or face covering increases exposure.”
DeSantis is rarely shown wearing a face mask, and has said that masks are needed only “when you can’t social distance.”
But the governor noted on Friday that “we’re starting to see an erosion of social distancing,” saying that it was “probably among the younger population.” He said the health department would launch public service announcements reminding Floridians to wash their hands frequently and to observe social distancing.
The governor added that the state will soon reopen a shuttered hospital in Miami-Dade to provide a safe transition for nursing home residents who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 and need to be isolated before they can return to their long-term care facilities.
The former Miami Medical Center, which has been closed since fall 2018 after going bankrupt, has about 140 beds available.
The state spent $3.5 million in emergency funds to make repairs to the hospital and pay its taxes. The facility will be named Children and Family Hospital of South Florida. Florida’s Division of Emergency Management also expects to pay about $40 million to staff the hospital and house and feed its employees, according to a proposal letter from SLSCO, a disaster response company headquartered in Texas.
The hospital is owned by Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, which is leasing the facility to the state.
The governor’s news conference was held as the Department of Health confirmed 3,822 new cases of COVID-19, setting another daily total record high since the start of the pandemic. The state now has a cumulative total of 89,748 confirmed cases.
Previously, the highest daily total recorded was on Thursday, when 3,207 cases were reported.
There were also 43 new deaths announced, raising the statewide death toll to 3,104.
Half of the new deaths but less than half of the new cases were in South Florida. Miami-Dade County reported 522 additional confirmed cases of COVID-19 and five new deaths Friday. The county now has a total of 24,376 confirmed cases and 864 deaths, the highest in the state.
One-hundred and twelve people were discharged and 75 people were admitted to Miami-Dade hospitals on Thursday, bringing the number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 complications to 644, according to Miami-Dade County’s “New Normal” dashboard data.
New COVID-19 cases in the state have been trending up since mid-May, according to a Miami Herald analysis of real-time data. Increases in testing alone could not account for the trends, the Herald found.
Donna Walsh, a health officer for the Florida Department of Health in Seminole County, told Orlando station WKMG Wednesday that the “majority” of new cases are in young people. In the past week, 114 cases in the county were patients in their 20s.
Walsh told the station that younger patients are being identified because they’ve sought out care, not because of an increase in testing, which the governor has cited as the cause for a rise in reported cases across Florida.
She said the young people have been symptomatic, and they’ve gone to urgent care, doctors offices and hospitals to be tested.
“So, what we’re seeing here locally, it doesn’t seem to be related to our increased community testing,” Walsh said.
Despite the lower age of COVID-positive Floridians, FIU — where the news conference was held — this week approved a three-phase plan to resume on-campus classes for the fall semester. The first step requires that all students, faculty and staff answer COVID-19 related questions on an app before returning.
The plan has been sent to the Board of Governors for final approval.
Herald staff writer Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 2:16 PM.