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DeSantis: Don't always trust COVID headlines on kids going back to school

Palm Beach County cases grow by 182 cases and the state gets 3,269. The county records 17 deaths with 139 statewide.

Jane Musgrave
Palm Beach Post

With hundreds of students testing positive for the coronavirus as they return to Florida universities, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday lashed out at the suggestion that sending young people back to school is unsafe.

Not only is it likely that the students contracted the virus before they went back to college or elementary and high schools that have reopened across the state, but the number of kids testing positive is remarkably low, he said.

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“You see the headlines that say, oh, 2,000 students at the University of Alabama … have tested positive and they test like 60,000 people. Actually I think it was less than 2,000,” he said. 

Matthew Caplin, Boynton Beach, gives instructions to patients Thursday at the community center in Wellington. Wellington has partnered with Premier Family Health to provide walk-up COVID-19 testing at the Wellington Community Center.

“So the rate is actually lower than it is in the United States, but it is being portrayed as if there was a massive outbreak at the University of Alabama,” he said during a press conference in Tampa.

Continuing his rant against the media, he said there is also no mention of the severity of the symptoms.

“Particularly for that age group, the vast majority of folks who are testing positive on these university campuses don’t have symptoms and don’t end up becoming ill,” he said. “I think that’s significant. I think that people would want to know that.”

While details about the severity of symptoms aren’t being released, the cases on college campuses are growing across the country, including in Florida.

According to data published by the New York Times this week, at least 727 students at the University of Central Florida have tested positive for the virus. The Orlando school, with the biggest student population in the state, has one of the highest number of infections of any university in the nation.

A person is tested for COVID-19 Wednesday at the FITTEAM Ball Park of the Palm Beaches drive-through facility in West Palm Beach.

The University of Florida has 266 cases, the University of South Florida has 220 and Florida State University has 68 cases, the newspaper reported. Other state universities have fewer than 51, it said

While it acknowledged that the numbers nationwide are hard to track and that it’s difficult to compare schools because each one reports them differently, the newspaper said that it is likely the cases are underreported.

And school officials are worried that students aren’t following social distancing guidelines and other safety precautions designed to curb the spread of the disease.

A campus party over the weekend prompted Florida State University to bar gatherings of more than 10 people, although groups of 50 are allowed under rules in place in Leon County and others outside South Florida.

“People around the country are waiting for campuses like ours to fail,” Amy Hecht, vice president of student affairs, wrote in an email to students on Wednesday. “But I hope that FSU students will learn from the past weekend’s mistakes and rise to the occasion.”

Palm Beach County Health Director Alina Alonso has said she expected cases to spike once college resumed. Once the parties begin and beer flows, inhibitions disappear and the masks come off, she told county commissioners at a recent meeting.

While only eight people under the age of 18 have died of COVID-19 in Florida, 3,357 have sought treatment in emergency rooms and 620 have been hospitalized, according to state health officials.

And, although DeSantis indicated that the percentage of young people testing positive for the virus is less than among the general population, that isn’t true in Florida.

Of the 326,328 children under 18 who have been tested since the pandemic began, 15% have tested positive for the virus, according to the Florida Department of Health.

By comparison, of the 4.5 million who have been tested throughout the state, 13.4% have tested positive.

On Thursday, the daily positivity rate, which shows the prevalence of the virus, increased slightly. 

Health experts say that the rate must remain consistently below 5% before any meaningful steps can be taken to combat the spread of the disease. Further, pediatricians say, it should be routinely below 5% before kids are sent back to school.

Of the nearly 59,000 tests reported statewide on Thursday, 6.41% were positive. In Palm Beach County, 5.22% of the roughly 3,400 tests that were reported were positive.

Over the past week, the state’s daily positivity rate has averaged 6.45% and the county average has been 4.64%.

DeSantis lauded the downward trend, saying it is among various metrics that offer encouraging signs that the state is escaping the worst phase of the pandemic.

The number of cases in Florida grew by another 3,269 on Thursday, pushing the state’s total caseload to 611,991, according to the state Health Department.

An additional 139 fatalities were reported, bringing the state’s death toll to 11,011, including 143 nonresidents who died in Florida.

Palm Beach County mirrored the state’s trends. With 182 new cases tallied, 41,195 people have been diagnosed with the highly infectious respiratory disease since the pandemic began in March.

An additional 17 deaths were reported, pushing the county's death toll to 1,111.

The deaths, which could have occurred weeks ago because of reporting delays, included two men, ages 55 and 56. The rest were over the age of 68, an age group most vulnerable to the deadly virus.

The number of deaths is the highest since last Thursday when 17 were also reported. But, those numbers can fluctuate because of lags in reporting.

In the past week, an average of eight fatalities have been reported each day.

The number of new cases reported both state and countywide is slightly below the daily average that have been reported during the past week.

On average, the state has reported 3,341 new cases each day, and the county has reported an average of 190.

For the first time since July 25, Florida is no longer home to the second highest number of coronavirus cases in the nation, according to a coronavirus tracking site operated by Johns Hopkins University.

Florida dropped into third place, behind Texas and California, after cases in the Lone Star State continued to spike in recent days while those in Florida have held steady.

But, Texas' hold on the No. 2 spot is tenuous. On Thursday morning, it had reported roughly 2,000 more cases than Florida did on Wednesday. With 687,004 confirmed cases, California leads the nation. It is the most populous state in the country, followed by Texas and then Florida.

But, DeSantis has not focused on Florida's steadily growing number of cases. Instead, he has emphasized the number of people hospitalized for treatment of COVID-19.

On Thursday, the patient count statewide continued to drop. There were 4,294 people hospitalized on Thursday morning, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration.

While the numbers change as people are admitted and discharged from the hospital, that is 201 fewer patients than were reported hospitalized on Wednesday morning.

In Palm Beach County, 238 people were hospitalized for treatment of COVID-19. That is a drop of 12 from Wednesday morning’s count.

“These are good trends,” DeSantis said at the press conference. “I think these are durable at least in the near future.”

But, he said, the key is that the drop came when theme parks and other businesses were allowed to reopen.

“Keeping society function was an approach that served us well and we’re going to continue to do that,” he said.

Sending young people and kids back to school is part of that effort. And, he insisted, despite kids of all ages testing positive for the virus, it can be done safely.

jmusgrave@pbpost.com

@pbpcourts