Miami-Dade’s midnight curfew will be lifted next week, county mayor announces
Miami-Dade County’s midnight curfew will be lifted next week, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced Monday, marking the imminent end of a measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 that has survived legal challenges and rankled business owners since its implementation last summer.
At a press conference, Levine Cava said that beginning at 12:01 a.m. April 12, businesses will be able to operate past midnight in Miami-Dade — the only county in Florida that continues to impose a COVID-related curfew.
She said her administration considered different data points in deciding to lift the curfew and also roll out a new, less stringent set of guidelines meant to help businesses stem the spread of the virus while getting back to work.
“We developed these new guidelines based on the current status of the COVID response, the availability of the vaccine, the aggressive campaign that we’re mounting,” Levine Cava said outside the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in Miami. “We considered all the available data, including the 14-day [test] positivity rate, and also hospitalization from COVID and death rates. These have all declined significantly as vaccinations for the most vulnerable have expanded and our overall vaccination program has progressed.”
The announcement — made the same day that Florida opened up vaccines to all adults — was a dramatic step toward loosening restrictions put in place by Levine Cava’s predecessor, Carlos Gimenez, during the throes of the pandemic.
Before Monday’s press conference, Levine Cava signed a new executive order that cancels a series of past COVID-related orders and says all businesses and facilities can remain open as long as they follow four basic rules: comply with mask requirements, provide hand sanitizer or hand-washing facilities, make “reasonable efforts” to keep social distancing and ensure “sick employees do not report to work.”
The new rules — not including the lifting of the curfew — will go into effect Tuesday at 6 p.m. Levine Cava said the eased regulations will allow childcare centers to double capacity, senior centers to resume programs and public water fountains to run again, under certain protocols.
“This truly is a turning point for us in addressing this disease,” she said.
Under pressure
Levine Cava had been targeting Monday as the date to lift the curfew that forces businesses to stay closed between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. In a March 5 memo to county commissioners, the mayor said she would lift the curfew on April 5 if COVID-19 conditions improved and if the two-week average of positive test results countywide hit 5.5% or less.
As of Sunday, that number was 6.4%, slightly higher than it was both a week earlier and a month earlier.
But the mayor said the positivity rate was only one of many factors in her decision. And Levine Cava’s chief medical officer, Dr. Peter Paige, said Monday that the county had expected a little bit of an increase in the positivity rate with the amount of activity in Miami this spring. The county, especially Miami Beach, has been a popular destination for spring breakers.
“We thought we’d get a little bump, but it really hasn’t been as bad as we thought it could have been,” he said. “So that’s also a positive.”
Levine Cava’s announcement comes amid pressure to lift the county’s COVID curfew. When Levine Cava extended the midnight curfew through March, it irked some county commissioners and restaurant owners. A group of Wynwood bars and restaurants filed a challenge to the curfew in federal court, arguing that the county failed to present evidence that COVID-19 “is more likely to spread ... during late-night hours as opposed to daytime hours.”
Lifting the curfew will mean big changes for bar owners. Michael Beltran, who owns Taurus Whiskey Bar in Coconut Grove and Scapegoat on Miami Beach, told the Miami Herald the bars have been announcing last call at 11:20 p.m. each night and playing the song “Closing Time” at 11:55 p.m. for months, while hoping the curfew would be lifted after spring break ended.
“We’ve been preparing and planning for this for a while,” Beltran said. “The bars had been doing a fraction of the sales they’re used to. And ours are small, chill bars that aren’t crazy.”
Staffing shortages throughout the restaurant industry will still present a challenge. Many part-timers have left the restaurant industry. In Miami, the hospitality sector is booming, but workers have been slow to return for a variety of reasons, including access to vaccines.
Beltran’s bars have liquor licenses that allow them to stay open until 3 a.m., meaning they will have to quickly hire staff and rethink work schedules.
“We’re going to have to get creative,” he said.
Nancy Torre, a 26-year employee at Miami International Airport and member of hospitality union Unite Here Local 355, said during the press conference that workers across the tourism and hospitality industry are eager to get back on the job now that vaccines are widely available and business restrictions are starting to ease.
“We all need to work. We lost our jobs due to COVID. Some have been called back, but we all need to get back to work,” she said. “We are the face of tourism here, and so we need to work safely, vaccinated and with social distancing and masks on.”
In the South Beach entertainment district, the epicenter of spring break revelry and a resulting backlash from Miami Beach officials, an even stricter 8 p.m. curfew remains in place on weekends. City officials voted last month to keep the restrictions in place until April 12, when they expect spring break to wind down.
New guidelines
Gimenez, the former mayor, issued the county’s New Normal rules last May coming out of a statewide shutdown and first imposed a countywide curfew in July as a surge of COVID-19 infections spread through the population. The curfew started at 10 p.m. then, but was moved back to midnight.
Other than the curfew, which will be completely lifted, the county’s new COVID rules are similar in many ways to the prior ones, with some wrinkles.
Masks are still required in public except in certain situations, including at religious institutions and hotels and outside while standing at least 10 feet away from non-family members.
Public gatherings of 10 or more people are still banned unless people are properly socially distanced. And there’s an exception for people on private boats.
Levine Cava’s executive order also clarifies that employees don’t need a negative COVID test before returning to work, mirroring a change the county made in its policy for county employees last month. Instead, employees can return 10 days after a positive test if they have no symptoms, 10 days after a positive test if they had mild symptoms and haven’t had a fever for 24 hours, or 14 days or longer if they had severe symptoms.
As before, non-compliant businesses must shut down until they submit a form to Miami-Dade police attesting that problems have been addressed. After that, businesses must turn in compliance plans if they’re caught breaking the rules again.
The county’s 34 municipalities can impose stricter COVID rules than the county as they see fit.
The executive order is supplemented by a 20-page handbook that isn’t legally binding but provides guidance on best practices for mask-wearing, social distancing, business capacity, sanitation and signage for various types of businesses.
Vaccines and variants
Though Levine Cava said Monday that available data support reduced restrictions, there are some reasons for concern.
An analysis last week by University of South Florida professor Jason Salemi showed that, over the previous two weeks, cases in people 18-24 in Miami-Dade had increased by 39%.
Variants of the virus and a particular mutation have also caused concern among researchers in recent weeks.
And the deadly virus is still circulating at substantial rates in Florida, especially in Miami-Dade, where there are about 47 daily cases per 100,000 people. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers anywhere between 5 to 50 daily cases per 100,000 people “moderate” spread, while anything above that is considered “high” spread.
But the county’s COVID dashboard shows that more than 458,000 of the county’s approximately 2.7 million residents have received a complete COVID vaccine series (one dose of Johnson & Johnson or two doses of Pfizer or Moderna), and another 335,000 have received a first dose.
David Grutman, founder of Groot Hospitality, which runs LIV and Story nightclubs on Miami Beach, said during Monday’s press conference that there’s now reason to hope for better days in the near future because of the increasing availability of vaccines.
“The fact that we’re able to roll out vaccines so quickly and act so quickly to get us back open, it’s amazing,” he said.
Miami Herald staff writer Carlos Frías contributed to this report.
This story was originally published April 5, 2021 at 1:35 PM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the curfew will be lifted the evening of April 12. It will in fact be lifted at 12:01 a.m. April 12.
