Public service and brought to Cable Television provider. Announcer 2 Florida Governor ron desantis held a briefing on the States Coronavirus pandemic. Joined by representatives from the community and state and local officials, the governor discussed testing in the state, the need for testing and adhering to medical protocols like Wearing Masks and social distancing. Gov. Desantis well good , afternoon. I want to thank everyone for being here. Blake Medical Center randy , curran, ceo of the Medical Center, and also my friend, bill, for being here. We also have representative will robinson, dr. Shari, Florida Division president. I want to thank him for being here. We have sherry, the Manatee County administer, and we have dr. Scott south, the doctor here at blake Medical Center. I think we will offer some interesting talks as well. From the beginning we wanted to do that. We are expanding testing. We are doing that. Yesterday, 95,000 tests. Today, over 80,000 tests. Put that in perspective, taiwan has done 78,000 tests the entire pandemic, and they are 23 million people. We are definitely doing a lot of testing. Practicing social distancing, and supporting hospital and health care workers. A couple updates on some of the things we have been working on. Today, hospitals throughout florida will be getting additional shipments of the therapeutic remdesivir,. That has been something a lot of physicians have been using. We got positive responses for it. Of course that is a new therapeutic developed and given in emergency use authorization by fda. We are scheduled to get more later in the month. But there was a need to be able to expedite that. I worked with the Vice President and i worked with secretary azar to get that expedited so there would not be a treatment gap. Those will be arriving today, and that will be a lot of files, lot of vials and hopefully able to serve patients needs. We also have more than 1000 personnel, Contract Personnel who will be deployed around the state to offer support for Different Services that are being undertaken. Some of it will be longterm care in covid only facilities, some of them supporting normal medical operations. Some of it may be supporting testing. When we talk to people around state, particularly with the Hospital System, a lot of it is making sure there is enough personnel to do all of this. Covid is laborintensive. There are a lot of procedures in terms of isolation. Obviously they have a lot of personnel who are involved in testing people those who come , into the hospital and people who are participating in some of these drivethrough or walkup test sites. Personnel is significant. We are doing a lot of that to be able to help. If you look at kind of where we have been now with testing, you know, when we started out, the tests were very scarce nationwide. I think florida probably had more results in one day yesterday than probably the country did as a whole and the in the beginning of march. We had a 10 point a Positivity Rate 10. 8 Positivity Rate, in may. That went down, and we had a good stretch from kind of the end of april through june 13, where we were 5. 1 or under, sometimes we were at 3 in terms of the positivity. As the case has expanded, or as the testing expanded, the positivity was manageable. You have more cases. That was kind of what you would expect. You test 200,000 people at 3 rate, you will get more cases than if you test 100,000 people at that. And then i think as you see, you know when we started to see more wes, yes, we started have been testing more last three weeks by far than we had before, but you see that 614 to 620, positivity goes up to 9. 6 , next week in june, 12 , then 14. 8 , for the ast part of june, beginning of july. You look around the state, there mayareas where we think we be seeing declining positivity, and there are other areas that have been pretty consistently 20 range, like miamidade. Here in manatee they have been about 10 the last two days. A majority of their new cases have been under the age of 45. Sarasota is reporting 5. 2 of tests positive. Yesterday was 9. 5 . And i think i think some of the folks here will attest we may be seeing some seeing decline in this part of the tampa bay area. Some of the other areas, north, down in places like pascoe, you may be seeing more positivity. This is something we are looking very seriously. We will get test results. Complete a week we will be over 400,000 tests easily the week, so that is a huge amount tests and a lot of it is Positivity Rate. You know there is obviously going to be some prevalence, in the single digits, that is something that is much more manageable. We increased from the end of june into july. It has been plateaued the last two weeks which is a good sign. We would rather be plateaued at 4 , but we did not want to see it continue to just go up and up. We have tested 2. 4 million people. That is one for every nine people in the state of florida. It will be interesting to see what other things have been tested at this level in our country, in modern times but this is something that something as a whole, the country has done tests. Obviously florida, we are doing a lot, particularly in the last however many weeks since demand has been high. If you look at where cases have been coming from, a lot of cases are in that between 15 and 54, which as you can see, those are not the age groups that are producing significant fatalities. In fact is if you are under 55, you dont have significant comorbidities, the fertility rate fatality rate is incredibly low. 85 , those are where the bulk of the case fatalities are in terms of those who are positive cases. And a lot of that is Nursing Homes. I will talk about some of that in a minute. We believe those 65 and up age group are at increased risk and we are continuing to advise to limit close contact outside the home and to avoid crowds as much as possible. But this is a pretty dramatic i think picture of showing how this virus operates and who tends to bear the brunt when they get infected. And the 25 to 34, if we were going back six weeks, it would not have been anything special on this map in terms of how many tests. I mean there have been positive tests for sure, but that has been a dramatic increase in terms of the number of positive cases in that age group. Far and away, they are the number one age cohort, 25 to 34yearolds. And if you look to see each individual age, how many there, we are still 21 and the number age that has the most cases. One 21, absent of significant comorbidity, is very likely to be asymptomatic or mild illness. So one of the things, when we look at these cases, and i know people like to talk, it gets reported, but when cases are reported to the state, that is a positive test that could have been taken seven days ago, eight days ago. There are all these companies. The report it. When the infection occurred is not even clear. Infection may have occurred two weeks ago when a test gets reported to a state from a private lab. So one of the things that you look at is ok, i can get a certain amount of test results reported today, next week, all kind of ways you can look at that, and there is all kind of ways data may not always come a coherentof fashion. When you look at e. D. Visits for people showing up to the e. D. Because they have influenza or covid like illnesses, that is evidence of what is going on. The more people doing that, you know, the more prevalence you have. If you look at kind of what we have seen the last few weeks, throughout may, it was flat. Statewide we were under 500 visits per day. For a state of 21 million people, it is a small number. Influenzalike illness, 250 or below, pretty much for weeks and weeks. As we got into june it was still low. You see it inch up as we got into the third week of june, when we get into the 614, it goes up. We start to see more visits. The following week, it escalates more. At the end of june, it escalated to where we were seeing more than 2000 e. D. Visits per day. Going to the e. D. Doesnt mean you will be admitted to the hospital, but youre showing up and you are symptomatic, they are testing you. We have seen statewide this start to trend downward, but you know, you look at a couple days and sometimes that can be more noise than signal. We want to continue to look at that. We will talk about here, the e. D. Visits have skewed younger, kind of that 35yearold range, which obviously is a different kind of clinical cohort than 55 and up. Syndrome manic and looking to see, that is very disruptive in terms of what were doing or what is going on in the state of florida. So protecting the vulnerable, you see the fatalities skew 65 and really 75 when you think about it. So this is something that is a priority. Given that you see more prevalence of this in the Community Today than we did, you know, say in the middle of may, it is important for those in at risk groups to avoid crowds and minimize close contact with people they do not live with. Of course if you are in a multigenerational living arrangement, there are risks with that. We have seen that in different parts of florida where you have multigenerational housing, a lot of crowded housing, more outbreaks, but obviously, there is only so much you can do. We understand that. There is the risk in the 65 and up category. And then underlying conditions, obviously, if you are 65 and up, elevated risk. Really any age that has some of these conditions, you need to take similar steps and avoid crowds, minimize close contact outside the home. One of the things, when you have folks who are under 65 or really under 50, the ones that have things like diabetes, morbid obesity, those are the ones that typically have a harder time with coronavirus. Just understand that and take whatever precautions you can. We talked before coming out here about longterm care facilities, which is really a really significant component of this, when, when we started this in march, we obviously knew the Nursing Homes were going to be ground zero because you have the most vulnerable population there. We did things like prohibiting visitors. You could have could not have visitors in Nursing Homes since the middle of march. That is tough for people, but we feared you would see more introduction of the virus if you allowed that. We prohibited hospitals from discharging covid positive patients back into Nursing Homes. I think when that was done in other states, that really had negative consequences. And we felt that that was the better course of action. We required ppe, like n95 masks, we sent 10 Million Masks plus to longterm care facilities, face shields, gowns, gloves, all that. And so we required them to use the ppe, but we provided ppe because we understood that was important to minimize spread in those facilities. We also understood as we started to get into april that even with doing all those precautions, you would still have it get in with a staff member maybe not wearing the ppe right, maybe it was not it toective as we wanted be, so you would see cases. We sent the National Guard to do testing in Nursing Homes because we understood we needed to identify cases before they could spread like wildfire. And so we understood there was need for some of these folks, if you do test positive and you are a resident of a longterm care facility, you had to be isolated appropriately so you did not spread it to other residents. And some of these Nursing Homes, longterm care facilities, they are just not set up to do appropriate isolation. And so we said you need to transfer those folks. Now some of them was just sending them to hospitals, basically just boarding, because they are medically stable but we felt that was probably not the best use of hospital resources if we could help it. We have now established 13 covid dedicated nursing facilities in the state of florida. These are nursing facilities that all the patients are covid positive. If you have somebody who tests positive in a nursing home in Manatee County, you can send in the nellis or charlotte in pinelleas or charlotte we are working on a , couple more facilities. This way they can be isolated and not spread it into their home facilities. We started the panamerican or the miamidade care center last week. We think that is going to be filled probably within a couple days. We have a number in south florida, central florida, we are working, i know the tampa bay area. They have dealt with a lot of nursing home outbreaks, particularly in pinellas county. While this is good we want to , see if there is ways to expand that. This is an important tool to protect residents of longterm care facilities who are the most vulnerable, but also if someone is stable or asymptomatic, having a place where they can go where they will not infect other people and they can be cared for. I want to thank the secretary for working hard on that. And we talked about the new facilities and the additional beds that we are bringing on every day for this. Just to show why this is important, so here in Manatee County, they have had i think as of yesterday or this morning, 138 covid related deaths, 91 of them have been related to longterm care facilities. So that is 66 of the coronarelated fatalities linked to longterm facilities. That is not only just saying 65 and up, but 65 and up and then residents of these facilities. Sarasota county, close by, 100 fatalities, 65 of them were related to residents of longterm facilities. So again 65 . So this is really, really a significant part of this fight. Social distancing. We have a much better idea now than in march about what the virus likes and does not like. And you know closed spaces, and i think you are seeing a lot of this activity throughout the sunbelt, some people have said it is because when it is hot, people would rather be inside in enclosed airconditioned spaces. The point is, if you are in an area where you have a crowd of people in doors in a party or , something, their conditioning, it is going to be a better vector for transmission. There is just no doubt about it. Peoples homes, obviously most people get infected from family members or friends. And essentially in the airconditioning, that is something that will be a good vector. The outdoor transmission has not been as significant. That heat and humidity are generally your friend when it comes to this virus. Likeirus doesnt typically that, it would prefer to be in the enclosed environments. Big crowds obviously provide more risk and then the close contact setting, if you were to stay in close contact with people, you dont even need to cough or sneeze at this point. If you are talking repeatedly, youre there for a long time, really the social distancing is very, very significant. If you maintain appropriate social distancing, you are not going to probably affect anyone or get infected. A facial covering if you cant do that, thats a way that could mitigate some of the particles that you may cough or sneeze or talk with and could produce some of the transmission. So if you are not in the situation where you can avoid s or appropriately social distance, wearing a Face Covering will help you. Low risk versus high risk, which is per the welldocumented at this point. When we talked about flattening the curve back in march, the main reason was when they show the Hospital System could cope with whatever happens in terms of the effects of the coronavirus and in march, this was a very new virus and we kind of knew in january, in florida, we were testing people. Almost all of them were negative throughout february. We got her first case of the variant of february and we now know that it was much more widespread than we thought, we had detecting criteria that was very limited. But there was problems with ppe, problems with testing. Whereere in a situation we got a lot of test sites around the state of florida. The hospitals are all testing, private companies are testing, cvs. In march he was very difficult to figure out how to test. Now its a little easier, which is a good thing for people and of course, we have drivethrough sites, walk up sites. We got all kinds of different ways people contest. Federal government just did recites into ball county, 3000 tests per day. Kind of moving around the country doing different things, but that has been good. Antibodyve free testing at five of our drivethrough sites. Two in miami, the hard rock stadium, the one in jacksonville at the jaguar stadium. Orlando convention center, and then the West Palm Beach site, at a spring training complex. If you are somebody who is not symptomatic and think you may have gotten this, the Antibody Testing may be better because if you got a month ago, you will most likely because it are for the antibodies and then you will at least know that you have it. Could have been infected a month ago and still gone positive even though you would no longer be infectious. Take advantage of the antibody. Its not as easy because it is a blood draw and takes a bit more time, but you get the results in 15 minutes, and it is instructive because if you have the antibody, that is important to know. Situation is much improved and if we speak with hospitals every day, im not with anyone saying ppe is an issue anymore and they have spent a huge amount of ppe, particularly in the longterm care facilities around the state and that is very significant. Ramdesivir, we did not have any of that in march. The steroid, some of the doctors think that has been good. Convalescent plasma has gotten good reviews. Tools in the now toolbox for when somebody comes in, they can be treated for this. And hopefully improve their success. On,her issue we are t working the u. S. Is testing more on a daily basis than any country by far, and the Lab Resources are backed up. Some of these turnaround times that are supposed to be 48 hours, the big commercial labs are running three or four days behind that. Some of the supplies are starting to run low. Im working with the white house to try to get some more reagents hospitals, ive s