Florida Adds 10,000 New Virus Cases; FDA Chief on GOP Meeting

Florida’s Covid-19 cases rose on Sunday in line with the one-week average but still above 10,000 as the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was too soon to tell if the Republican convention in Jacksonville will be safe.

Reported cases rose by 10,059, or 5.3%, to 200,111, compared with an average 5.3% in the previous seven days. The Sunshine State set a record with 11,458 cases on Saturday. Deaths reached 3,731, according to the report, which has data through Saturday, up by 29.

The GOP nominating convention originally set for Charlotte was moved to Jacksonville — including President Donald Trump’s acceptance speech — after North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, disagreed with hosting the Aug. 24-27 event at full scale out of concern of the virus spread.

“I think it’s too early to tell,” Hahn said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, answering a question about safety. “We’ll have to see how this unfolds in Florida and elsewhere around the country.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has resisted returning to a lockdown, but hospitals and local officials in the state are reacting to the rising trend in cases, but local officials have been taking their own steps.

“We’ve been breaking record after record after record the last couple of weeks,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” The city instituted a mask-in-public rule and increased the severity of penalties for businesses that don’t follow the rules, Suarez said.

The city’s famed beaches closed for Independence Day weekend, and the public response has been good, he said, “Obviously, they’re a little bit upset to some extent, but we’ve seen compliance,” Suarez said.

Cumulative hospitalizations rose by 160, or 1%, to 15,735, slowing from the pace from the day before. The median age of patients rose to 36 from 35 the previous day.

In response to steady increases in hospitalizations in Miami-Dade County, Jackson Health System, operator of one of Florida’s biggest hospitals, said last week it would limit inpatient surgeries and procedures to emergency and urgent cases.

The rate of people testing positive for the first time rose to 15% on Saturday, from 14.1% a day earlier.

— With assistance by Jonathan Levin

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