What caused Miami’s weekend coronavirus spike? Governor says it was testing backlog
The weekend spike of about 550 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Miami-Dade County was largely due to a backlog of three-week-old test results from an undisclosed testing site, Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Monday.
The governor sought to put the spike into a positive context during a celebratory press conference about the progress the state is making on construction projects on Interstate 4 near Orlando.
Though he said he first suspected the numbers were driven by a growing outbreak among prisoners at the Homestead Correctional Institution, DeSantis said it turned out that about 400 of Saturday’s 554 new cases were due to a “test center not affiliated with the state” that hadn’t reported the results for cases from three weeks ago.
“I think Miami’s trend has been good,” DeSantis said during the press conference. “ ... It’s important, as you see this, to look behind the numbers.”
Last month, the Miami Herald reported that the Florida Department of Health had been significantly under-reporting its COVID-19 testing backlog from private labs. Department officials still won’t say how many pending tests there are and have refused to provide copies of private lab contracts to the Miami Herald despite repeated requests since March 21.
The jump in COVID-19 cases was accompanied by a rise in hospitalizations throughout the county that coincided with Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s lifting the emergency closure order on most businesses — relief he had tied to improvements in both metrics.
At a press conference Monday in Opa-locka, Gimenez said the latest statistics did not cause him to consider reimposing some business restrictions.
Gimenez, whose administration is requiring daily reports from nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, blamed the increased hospitalization rate on an increase in residents from the long-term facilities being sent to hospitals for COVID-19 treatment. Those numbers, he said, shouldn’t discourage lifting commercial restrictions designed to shield the general population from the virus.
“There’s been a concerted effort by the state to get more of those patients into hospitals and out of nursing homes,” he said at an opening of a walk-up testing site in the city. “That’s essentially where the battle is being waged right now, at nursing homes and ALFs.”
He said he supported the DeSantis administration’s strategy of encouraging nursing homes to shift COVID-19 cases to hospitals.
“In New York, they made the mistake of actually transferring people from hospitals into nursing homes. I think that cost a lot of lives,” he said. “We’re doing it the other way.”
Gimenez said the nursing-home transfers haven’t left Miami-Dade with a shortage of critical-care beds.
”We still have plenty of capacity,” he said.
The mayor added that the county plans to target nursing-home cases with its new effort to hire up to 1,000 workers to perform “contract tracing” on people with COVID-19. That practice involves interviewing people who tested positive and attempting to retrace their contacts with others and get them tested as well, with the goal of tamping down new outbreaks.
While Gimenez pegged the rise in hospitalizations to transfers from facilities providing long-term care, the mayor said he did not have an independent conclusion on why cases are up.
“I’ve got to look at it,” he said.
Virus simmers in women’s prison
Though the spike in cases wasn’t directly attributed to Homestead Correctional, infections in the women’s prison have been on the rise.
Homestead became the most infected Florida prison over the weekend, recording 231 inmates who had tested positive Saturday, a jump from 166 the day before. As of Monday, that number stayed at 231. According to the Department of Corrections, 715 COVID-19 tests had been administered at the facility, which can hold about 668 inmates.
Homestead is one of the prison system’s smallest facilities but has recorded the greatest number of positive cases.
Amanda Nevins, the sister of an inmate who tested positive, said many women were moved “from dorm to dorm, dorm to dorm,” without being tested first.
Advocates for prisoners told the Miami Herald last week that the movement was an attempt to isolate people who may have had contact with two women who initially tested positive. Over the weekend, with permission from the warden, a group of advocates led by Debra Bennett brought in thousands of bars of soap, toilet paper, bleach and face shields to try to reduce the spread.
“I feel like Homestead was trying to get a hold of the situation,” said Bennett, an advocate for women inmates who served almost two decades in Florida’s prison system. “They were trying to guess at who may have been affected. It’s just not possible.”
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 4:57 PM.
