Florida Governor Ron DeSantis COVID-19 Briefing Transcript April 10

Ron DeSantis: (00:02)
Well, good morning or good afternoon. I want to wish everybody a happy Good Friday. I know this is a lot different than what we’re used to, but for those who are reflecting and celebrating or reflecting on the day. I hope you are able to do that safely with your family. It’s a very solemn day for those of us of a Christian faith. I also want to thank the city of Jacksonville for all that they’ve done with this test site and everything else they’ve done to protect their community. I want to thank the mayor. I want to thank the sheriff. I want to thank other folks.

This test site was one of the sites we requested that the federal government helps support because we thought expanding testing was something that was very important in the state of Florida. If you look right now, we have now done over 160,000 tests completed and you have thousands of, thousands of more where the results will be coming in over the next few days. So I think by next week we will probably hit 200,000 tests at some point. That is a good thing to expand testing. We’re now testing, I think about one in every 140 Floridians has been tested. South Korea had been the kind of testing model and they had done one every 200 in South Korea. So we’ve been able to ramp this up in a relatively short amount of time, but we want to keep doing it.

So this site has already done thousands of tests for the people of Northeast Florida. And I think that, that’s been something that’s been very good. The federal government sourced this and provided us PPE and some of the testing swabs, so we appreciate that. But this was only supposed to go to April 10th and then the Feds were going to either turn it over to us or, or let it go. But I thought that it was important to keep it going. I spoke with the mayor, we want to be able to have access to testing across the state of Florida, and so we made it clear we’re going to be here, we’re sending support from the state of Florida. We got additional National Guard coming to be able to make sure that the people have access to a drive through testing site. And then once we put our commitment out publicly, FEMA actually said that they can continue to also send some supplies to help out.

So I think that, that’s been a win-win and we want to continue to do it. So for all three sites throughout the state of Florida, Jacksonville, Orange County Convention Center, and Central Florida and Hard Rock Stadium in Miami-Dade County, all three of those sites are going to continue going forward. And I think it’s important in all of those communities that we’re doing that. But the one thing that we’re going to do differently, and I think even better, is we’re going to expand the criteria for those who are able to come through these testing sites. When we started it, the federal contracts limited the amount of samples that could be taken daily to 250. Now, they did a good job here in Jacksonville getting people through. That probably was pretty consistent with demand.

I think Orlando, Miami probably had some more demand than that. And so now that the state is taking over the testing, we are going to open it up. We want to do more than 250 a day if the demand is there. But because it was limited, you were focusing on 65 and plus with symptoms as well as first responders and healthcare workers. And obviously that’s the tip of the spear, the people that are out there protecting us. And then those folks who are 65 and plus, they obviously are most at risk from this virus. So it made sense to do that. But I think though we really want to expand that beyond. I think we have the capacity to do it and I think that, that will give more opportunities for people in Northeast Florida and other parts of Florida.

So starting this Monday at the site here in Jacksonville, at the Orange County Convention Center, and at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami-Dade, anybody that has coronavirus symptoms, regardless of age, can come and get tested. All first responders and healthcare workers can get tested. And then anybody who has had close, sustained contacts with an individual that has recently tested positive for COVID-19 may get tested even if you personally haven’t developed symptoms. I think what we’re trying to do is get a sense of people that are asymptomatic who may be carrying the virus and maybe spreading the virus. So if you’ve had close sustained contact with somebody, even if you haven’t developed symptoms, if that person you’ve had close contacts with has tested positive for COVID-19 and you want to come get tested, then you’re going to be able to come in these sites.

And I think that this is important. Healthcare workers includes any staff member at longterm care facilities. We’ve done things very early on strict rules, strict limitations on access to these facilities where some of our vulnerable residents are. We’ve required all people who work with residents to wear PPE like N95 masks. And we want to have those workers to be able to have the ability to get tested as well. So if you work at a hospital, obviously you qualify, but if you work at a nursing home or a longterm care facility, you qualify as well. So we have now, as I mentioned, tested about 163,000 with test results. We’ve tested more and those results come in on a rolling basis.

We have a total of six drive through sites in addition to the one here in Jacksonville in partnership with the Florida National Guard. So we’ve had tens of thousands of people be able to come through these sites. We’re also doing our best to expand access to rapid tests. These will be a game changer. There’s a couple of different tests. There’s a 45 minute test by a company called Cepheid and that has been distributed to certain hospitals throughout the state of Florida. And then we have the Abbott Labs, a five minute test that has just come on the market. We were able to get that sent to a lot of hospitals here in Jacksonville. They sent it to St. Vincent’s, but we’re looking to get that available to all hospitals throughout the state of Florida. So some of that is some of the ones that the state has acquired at the Department of Health. We’re going to be sending those to different places throughout the state of Florida, but we’re also asking some of the hospitals that have a lot of these machines. If you have another hospital system in your demographic, in your DMA, maybe send them a couple. So that everyone has access to this because this really helps healthcare workers. It really helps identify patients as they come in with symptoms, whether they’re positive for COVID-19 or not.

We’re also trying to acquire the new antibody test. There’s a lot of these tests out there, but it’s important. You got to get the test that’s FDA approved for this particular coronavirus. This isn’t the only coronavirus that circulates. So some of these tests will determine whether you have antibodies for any coronavirus. Well, if you had a common cold or something that’s much different than this. So we’re looking at tests that are FDA approved specifically for COVID-19 antibodies and then be able to do that. That will be helpful in a couple of ways. One, it’ll give us a sense of how much this virus has actually penetrated the community. You have people that are studying this at places like Oxford and Stanford, and a lot of people think that this may have been way more prevalent than we thought. It just lot of people don’t develop symptoms from it.

So having an antibody test and doing some sampling will give us an idea of how much it’s penetrated. It will also give us a more accurate denominator. We test people and then if they’re positive, we say that’s a case, but there are probably a lot of people who’ve never even sought medical care, who may have had this virus because they just didn’t develop severe symptoms or maybe they didn’t develop symptoms at all. So that’s very important. It’s also important if you know that you have the antibodies. I think the general thought is, is that you have developed some sort of immunity to being infected in the future. They’re not 100% sure on that, but I think that’s kind of the general consensus on that.

So I think having wide antibody testing will be something that’s very, very important in Florida and we’re working as hard as we can to roll that out. Another update on travel, as you know, when people come to Florida from the hotspots, either by plane or by car, they are being met at the border, met at the airport, and they have to self isolate for 14 days. So we have screened about 17,000 people from either New York City or new Orleans over the last, I guess we’re probably looking at a week and a half now. So we want to continue doing that. We also have …

So we want to continue doing that. We also have put out huge amounts of supplies. As of yesterday, the Division of Emergency Management has sent out 5.2 million masks, more than 500,000 face shields, 4.75 million gloves, and 275,000 gowns. So this has probably been the biggest logistical operation in the history of the state of Florida. I was talking to the White House. We’re anticipating getting more of the N95 masks as well, so we’ll push even more masks out, hopefully, over a very short period of time. The PPE is very important for the healthcare workers, and it’s been a big priority for us here in the state of Florida. If you look at hospitalizations, the whole premise of flattening the curve was you needed the healthcare system to be able to cope with the infections and people that needed to be hospitalized. So that’s something that we’ve taken very seriously in Florida, both in terms of the social distancing but also doing things like stopping the elective surgeries to make sure we have room in the hospitals.

Right now, the capacity in Florida hospitals statewide, 44% of the hospital beds in the state of Florida are available. Statewide, almost 40% of ICU beds are available. Here in Duval County, you’ve got about 45% of the beds are available, and almost 48% of the ICU beds are available. We track the hospitalizations very closely to see what trends are developing. Over the last eight hours, there’s been a net reduction in 50 people hospitalized for COVID-19, a net reduction of two in Duval County. But that is really a good indication of how this is trending. So we keep an eye on that. Even though there is capacity, we’ve planned from the beginning if there were to be a surge situation. So we have facilities in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach. We have the capacity to have a field hospital here in Jacksonville should the need arise. And then we’re also looking at Central Florida and trying to figure out how this develops.

But right now there’s capacity, so that’s a good sign. And we want to hopefully get through this where the hospitals are intact and we don’t have any part overflowing. One thing that we’ve been very, very insistent on, really from the very beginning, is protecting nursing homes, long-term care facilities and assisted living facilities. This is a virus that if you look in the state of Florida, over 85% of the fatalities are people 65 and up. Usually, they have chronic conditions, but clearly this is a virus that I think presents a specific danger to elderly populations. And so we’ve done things like put strong regulations in place, limit visitation and require that hospital staff wear personal protective equipment including masks when they’re interacting with the residents. And I think by and large in the state of Florida, the folks who’ve been in charge of these facilities have worked very hard at protecting their residents.

The Department of Health now has a strike team on-site at a nursing home in Suwannee County. There was an outbreak there emanating from staff members. So we have 51 people affiliated with this facility that have tested positive. 30 of those are members of the staff. And so this is a situation where if a staff member is sick they cannot be allowed to go into that facility. And it seems like most of the interaction was with other staff, but you still have 20 residents that have tested positive. There are more that are awaiting results. So that investigation is ongoing by the Department of Health, but they have traced the positive cases back to an employee that is working directly with the residents.

Final update I have is regarding the unemployment compensation. So far this week we have a total of 225,755 initial claims that have been filed. Obviously, those need to be processed. We have the CONNECT system, which there were some changes to that to increase capacity. But we’ve also done a Pega site so people can apply through that. And then the data’s going to need to be migrated through CONNECT. So they’re working on that, but that site is able to take a much higher volume of people coming into the site. We’ve also have almost 12,000 applications received by paper. Federal Express was kind enough to offer their stores where people could drop off applications, and then they’re now mailing them to Tallahassee. We have over 2,000 state employees from various agencies that are either on standby to help this or are actively helping the processing of these applications. We’ve also beefed up the call center. And I’ve told them, “You need to beef it up as much as you can to be able to meet the demand.”

You’re seeing this throughout the country, but the amount of unemployment claims nationwide in just a few week period, I think it took us a year or certainly many months to be able to reach this level of claims during the Great Recession. So this is a shock like we’ve never seen before, so we’re shifting as many resources to this as we can to be able to meet this real crushing demand. So I want to thank the mayor, the sheriff, Jacksonville Fire Rescue, everybody who’s been involved in this site. I think it’s important that we keep it going. And I think it’s important that we’re going to have expanded test criteria so a greater variety of people can come in, anyone with corona symptoms, anybody who’s got … works at a healthcare facility or as a first responder.

And then even if you haven’t developed symptoms but you’ve had close sustained contact with somebody who has recently tested positive and you want to come and get tested, we are testing those people as well. And I think that that’s a good approach and I think this continues our efforts to make testing widespread in the state of Florida. With that, we’re going to hear from the mayor and then hear from Director Moskowitz.

Speaker 1: (15:37)
Thank you, Governor. Just like to say to our Jewish brothers and sisters that are celebrating Passover and those of us that are Christians remembering Good Friday and looking forward to the Resurrection on Sunday, it’s a reminder that we all care about each other. We all count on each other. And we’re going to come out of this and look forward to a new day because we’re all doing the right things. I want to thank Governor DeSantis for not only keeping this testing site going, but for all of the communication, all of the access and all of the help. He and his team have been so accessible and so helpful over the last however many weeks this thing has gone on.

Speaker 1: (16:17)
When I learned that this testing site was going to potentially close down, obviously, it was an incredible concern as we’re in the middle of this, as we appear to be flattening this here in Duval County. The governor called me two nights ago and said, “If you want to keep this going, we’re in.” So Governor, to you and your team, thank you very much. I want to thank the governor and Director Moskowitz for the $20 million that you expedited from other crisis dollars that we had spent. That has allowed us to deploy that cash to make sure that we can respond to this appropriately and accordingly.

Speaker 1: (16:49)
I would remind people the criteria for testing here. Respiratory symptoms or first responder or a healthcare worker that’s had contact with patients, you can be tested for COVID-19 at this location. And then also a thank you to the National Guard. My understanding, they’re here now, but Monday they’ll begin running shifts which will allow our first responders, Jacksonville Fire and Rescue and police officers, some of those to get back to some of the stuff they do in terms of caring for people in our community outside of this site every day. So again, thank you and Director Moskowitz, I’ll turn it over to you.

Director Moskowitz: (17:28)
Governor, thank you. Mayor, appreciate all your efforts. I also appreciate you lending us your mobile command unit so that we can have that at our EOC so that we can decompress some of our EOC, so that we also could follow social distancing guidelines at the State EOC. So thank you for that. As the governor alluded that we are running the largest logistics mission in state history, 24 hours a day, out of our warehouse in Orlando. Yesterday we had our largest mission ever run in state history in one day. In one day we distributed 2 million masks, 300-

In one day, we distributed two million masks, 300,000 face shields, 50,000 containers of hand sanitizer, 500,000 shoe covers, over 100,000 gowns and 350,000 gloves. We are continuing to make sure that we have the supplies necessary to increase testing as the governor has alluded to, and so we will continue to work with not just FEMA and HHS, but also private vendors. I want to thank actually the private vendors who actually have come through on the quotes and the orders that we’ve made and have delivered these goods to our warehouse in Orlando. As soon as they come in, they go out the door. As the mayor alluded to, I want to thank under the governor’s leadership and direction, we have in the last three weeks been able to deploy $220 million worth of reimbursement, mostly from Irma dollars that were at the division.

So we knew that that money was going to be extremely important to cities, counties and hospitals across the state in their fight against COVID-19, and that has brought the division to $2 billion in a 16 month timeline. It’s the most amount of money that the division has ever handed out in that period of time by double. So we know that that money is critical during these times. We are full steam ahead in setting up all of the temporary bed facilities as the governor has talked about, 450 beds at the Convention Center in Miami Beach, and then we have five 250 bed field hospitals around the state, one here in Jacksonville stationed in the event it becomes a necessary. We are still moving forward with the plan. I want to remind Floridians who are very used to hurricanes and watching different spaghetti models taking different tracks and [inaudible 00:19:54] turns and we let our guard down.

While the data is looking good, now is not the time to stop social distancing, now is not the time to stop listing and following that CDC guidance. So while things are looking better, they’re looking better because we’re doing all of the measures that the governor has instituted. So let’s continue to do that, let’s continue to get to the other side of it, and I want to thank everybody in the religious community, in the Jewish faith and the Christian faith as we get through this week of Passover and Eastover to step up to the plate, make sure that religious institutions are an essential business, but at the same time not having those mass gatherings. It’s extremely important to make sure that happen. So we’re all in this together. Governor, thank you.

Great. We really appreciate the partnership with the City of Jacksonville. This is a bottom up effort, and when you have great leadership at the municipal and county level, it makes all the difference in the world. So I just want to thank the mayor, I want to thank the sheriff and I want to thank everyone in the different agencies here in Jacksonville for all their hard work. With that, I’ll take some questions.

Speaker 3: (21:12)
Governor, the government said that nobody [inaudible 00:21:12]

Not in Florida. So in Florida, we’ve had no fatalities under 25.

Speaker 3: (21:17)
Well, why is [inaudible 00:21:17]

So in the State of Florida, if you look, 85 plus percent of our fatalities are 65 and up, and that’s just the reality, and so I think that the virus … That’s one of the reasons why at the very beginning of this we took swift action with nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and advised very early for people 65 and over and people with chronic conditions to stay at home as much as possible and avoid crowds. That was from the very beginning because it was obvious that this virus had a disproportionate impact on folks who were older, and particularly those folks who have a series of chronic conditions. I mean, part of this is, as people get older, they develop more of these conditions. It is probably true. If you look, if someone’s perfectly healthy at 65, someone’s 55 but has three chronic conditions, coronavirus may be more of a threat for the 55 with the three chronic conditions.

But that’s just the reality of the situation that we find ourselves in. So the protective efforts, of course, you got to be very careful when you’re talking about elderly, if you’re talking about somebody who has compromised immune system, and if you’re talking about somebody who may have diabetes, some of the people who are very obese, those are the folks who, when they acquire the virus, are much more likely to be hospitalized, much more likely to have a very significant illness, and unfortunately disproportionally represented in the fatalities in the State of Florida. [crosstalk 00:22:46]

Speaker 4: (22:47)
[inaudible 00:22:46]. Talk about that [inaudible 00:23:00]

So it’s interesting. I think it’s a great question. So if you talk to Dr. [Burks 00:05:06], which I have, and some of the people in the task force, they will point out that places like New York City, there’s 40% of the people are testing positive. So here in Jacksonville, the people that are coming through, they’re either healthcare workers, first responders or they have symptoms. So you’re not just testing a random sampling, you’re really are focusing on people that have symptoms. So to have a 5% or 6% rate, to me that’s a good sign because in other parts of the country, when you get 30%, 35%, 40%, that’s an indication that it’s spreading much more significantly throughout the … If you look too in Florida, you look at our cases, over 60% I think are in three counties in Southeast Florida, Broward, Dade and Palm Beach County.

So if you look beyond that, there are cases, I mean obviously 5%, 6% in here. If you go to Pinellas County, Hillsborough, I think it’s probably pretty similar. But that is different than when you have … Like in Miami, where they’ve been between 15% and 20% have tested positive in Miami-Dade. So you see that it’s spread. I think it’s spread more widely there than it has here. That is something to keep. I would say look to see that positive number, and if it is in that, then I think that you’re doing the right thing, just keep at it. But then also, you can see how the cases evolve, and in Florida if you look, we went … First obviously, there wasn’t a lot of testing early on, the CDC was only testing people who had actually come back from China. I think as we know now, the East Coast of the United States probably wasn’t seeded from China as much as it was from Europe.

We obviously have a lot of people in Florida who travel internationally. We get a huge numbers of international travelers. So the China thing here in Florida may not have been the right … You may have needed to really look other places but nevertheless. That’s how it was evolved. So once we expanded testing, you started to see the numbers go up. But now we’re testing consistently to where I think you start to get a good benchmark. I think this morning, we got a 16,000 test results from yesterday and very low percentage. I think it was 8% even including Miami. But I think part of that was yesterday the percentage was a lot higher, much more fewer results.

So I think some of those negatives just got bottled up and they got dumped today. So if you look and see how the new cases are developing and then look at the trend and hospitalizations, those are really the key things. There’s some parts of the state where you’ve had a lot of cases, but the hospitalization rate is lower. There’s other parts where the cases aren’t as much, but the people who are testing positive are a little bit more likely to be hospitalized. But those are all the things to look at. But I would just say listen to the mayor, listen to the sheriff, listen to the folks here, because I think Northeast Florida has handled this very well, and I think if you just keep doing what you’re doing, I think we’re going to be able to get through this here in Northeast. Florida.

Does someone else have a question? Yes ma’am.

Well, so we had the one where we had a number of fatalities. What the health department does is, AHCA put in really stringent regulations in terms of access, in terms of how they had to interact with the residents. We required the personal protective equipment when you’re interacting with the residents. So what happens in one of these is Department of Health will investigate and determine whether the law, the regulations were followed or not. I think in almost all these cases, it’s been where a staff member comes in that’s sick and is not wearing the personal protective equipment. We’ve not allowed visitors at nursing homes for probably almost a month now. That’s tough on the residents.

For probably almost a month now. That’s tough on the residents because they’re not being able to interact. One of the things we’re doing with the Department of Elder Affairs is we’re launching a project to get tablets into these nursing homes so that they can FaceTime with their family members, but it’s a tough thing. But you’re doing that because we just don’t know if someone goes in and is carrying the virus, but isn’t showing a lot of symptoms, they could potentially spread this there. But all those get investigated. What I would also say though is with these rapid tests that’s going to really help us protect the nursing homes even better, because what happens is if someone in a nursing home developed symptoms, they go to the hospital, they’ll swab them. By the time it goes through the lab, you could have 48, 72 hours, and a lot of times the hospitals, if the person doesn’t need intensive care, may want to put them back to the nursing home.

We obviously are concerned about that because if they are carrying it, you can spread it and you can have an outbreak. Now that you have the rapid test, if someone in a nursing home has symptoms, you test them and they’re negative, that means they have something else, so the chance of an outbreak … Also you could test the staff as people come in, you get a five minute test on the staff. If they’re positive, then obviously they can’t be anywhere near those nursing homes. And so I’ve instructed Dr. Rifkin at the Department of Health to harness those as much as we can. Obviously the hospitals need it, but then the next thing, are these are the nursing homes in longterm care facilities. Because it really can be a game changer, and I think if applied properly can save lives. Yes ma’am?

Speaker 8: (28:35)
[inaudible 00:28:38].

No, look, I don’t think you need recrimination. I mean, I was told by the agency three weeks ago when I said, “Beef up the call center.” And I said, “We’re doing that.” They said, “We’ll just tell people to go to the website.” So they told me this website was great. Well, obviously it couldn’t handle this capacity. They were wrong. And so what we’ve done is just built capacity. We’ve built a parallel site where people can go on and then I’ve identified 2,000 people throughout the Florida government, these are people who are working in agencies that have nothing to do with unemployment compensation, but because it’s an emergency, I felt that they need to be all hands on deck. So we have really an unprecedented amount of manpower. I think that we’ve been able to respond quickly.

This is a nationwide problem. This is … These systems were not designed for this, but we have to figure out a way to get it done. So I think the things we’ve done have been positive, but if there are more things to do, I want to do it. But my focus is on, let’s just get the checks out. Let’s get the direct deposits out for people that don’t have bank, send debit cards, however we’re doing it to make sure that people have it. We do think we’re going to start to get some of the federal unemployment money soon. We were concerned that we wouldn’t get that for another couple of weeks.

So we’re hopeful that’s going to start hitting soon. And so that’ll be another amount of money. So really between what Florida has and the feds, I think you’re close to about $900 a week now. That obviously is … You’re not going to live high on the hog on that. But for people who’ve lost their jobs to be able to get that, that I think could make a big difference when you’re talking about kids, when you’re talking about food, when you’re talking about all the necessities of life.

Speaker 8: (30:28)
[inaudible 00:30:36].

So typically it’s for unemployment, even in the days when we had 2.8% and we’d get 250 claims a day, it would take about three plus weeks to get it turned around. And I’ve told them … They’ve changed kind of the way it’s done because I told them you need to get it out as quick as possible. So there have been changes internally to how it’s done. It is just the fact though that under existing law, you have to have a valid social security number, you have to have a valid identification, and you have to have been employed in a Florida business. In other words, if someone is from another state and they come here, they’re obviously not going to be eligible. So there are things that need to be checked. But one of the reasons I identified these 2,000 employees is because if we have 100,000 claims outstanding, you have 2,000 employees, start giving it, do the verification and, and let’s get moving on it.

So I’m hoping they can do it as quickly as possible, but just even before this rush, this is a process that took three weeks. So hopefully they can do it quicker than that. Because I know folks are … You’ve had a number of people that have been furloughed, number of people that have lost their jobs. But I think what’s going to happen is there were some companies that kept the employees being paid even though they really weren’t able to operate at full capacity. But I think because this is now … Initially was 15 days to stop the spread, then another 30, then I think some of these businesses are like, “Okay, well we’re not going to be able to keep paying if we’re not able to do business.” So I think you’re going to see in the middle of a month there’ll be another uptick for people who have been furloughed.

My hope is that … We’re actually working with some of the companies to try and get this stuff teed up now so that we can start working on it. But my hope would be you’ll get the money out. But then most of these furloughed employees, once we’re able to start phase two of this, where we start to have the economy function again, that a lot of those employees will get hired back. I mean, that’s some of the federal assistance that you’re doing. I would support a phase four really focused on protecting employees even more, because people have been upended through no fault of their own, and I think it’s in our country’s interests, in our state interests to be able to get people back where they were and back to being productive again. But it’s got to take a lot of effort, both federally, state, and locally. All right. Thanks guys. [ crosstalk 00:33:03].

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis COVID-19 Briefing Transcript April 10

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