Product. We have folks that have been consulting with physicians who have been working with written products. Im confident its not a matter of if, just when. But we have to get there. Part of the reason we were able to have the discussion is because we have seen a great amount of success throughout the state but particularly in Orange County. The county Health Department and the mayor and the folks involved with that deserve a lot of credit. Last night, florida had 581 Covid Patients in the icu statewide. That is the lowest in a month. For a state of 22 million people, that is a small number. In Orange County, 1. 4 million people, you have 21 Covid Patients in the icu. Orange county last night, 51 of the icu beds were available and were empty. You have not seen the hospitals here get overwhelmed, not even close. We are a part of phase one on monday, we are unlocking the elective medical procedures because they have so much space and people need to get these. In terms of ventilators, we are down to the number of patients on ventilators has declined. We are at 356 patients statewide that are on ventilators. There are 6361 ventilators that are not used. Theres not going to be any lack of ventilators for anybody. That is very important. Testing. Yesterday, i was in pensacola to roll out a new test site. As we do phase one, we believe we need to be testing even more. We have been doing robust testing. We have 20,000 results back yesterday. We have been consistently in the 15,000 a day. Part of it is we have these drivethrough sites in different parts of the state and capacity exceeds demand in many parts of the state. We have had a good thing but looking at yesterdays test results, there were 723 new florida cases out of 19,000 total test results. That is a Positivity Rate of 4. 1 . Over the last 10 days, the Positivity Rate in the state of florida has been between 6. 1 and 4. 1 . I think the National Average is between 15 and 20 . New jersey, they are 40 of everybody who takes a test, tests positive. In florida we are about 95 negative rate for testtakers. Orange county yesterday, they had 18 new cases, but that was out of 1760 tests. The Positivity Rate was 1 . If you look over the last two weeks, they have been, usually in the 1 or 2 range one day was 4 . One day of 4 which both places in the country would kill to have that. You are than 1 or 2 . You look, a community that has more traffic coming into it from everywhere in the world and the united states, there is no way you could have a pathogen circulating and not end up with a tourism, the number of people in our country that come here. To have numbers like that, you look at the indicators such as the Surveillance Data for hospitals, the syndromatic indicators. Cough associations are lower than they have been all year even with the pandemic. Ili has gone down. This is a great story. As Orange County and the rest of Central Florida has done a great job badly this, they will be part of the foundation as we get into these next phases and bring back florida to where we want to have it. If you look at the other things we will be doing down the pike, we tested 420,000 people in florida, we have seven drivethrough sites that have been operating, that we are adding pensacola which had a soft open yesterday, large open today, sarasota, bradenton, naples, fort myers and then a a hybrid walkup site at Miami Beach Convention center. You will have more opportunities to test. If you are putting people back to work and maybe a worker has symptoms, there are easy ways to do it. County Health Departments are doing it, doctors offices. We are expanding in many ways. The drivethrough sites will continue, when the federal government stops supplying them. The mayor was like we want to keep it. We have been happy to support that. We will continue to do it. You see in orlando here, we have done walkup Testing Community sites. You set it up, people walk up, you can reach out to underserved communities and offer testing in ways that are effective. They have done 10,000 tests on the walkup concept. A number of locations in Orange County which we appreciate. We will continue deploying walkup sites when we can. We have done the national guard. 50 strike teams, they have been going out in the nursing homes, they have tested 12,000 people. That is the most vulnerable part of our society to covid19. We will continue to do that. We are also launching hopefully early next week a mobile lab in a converted rv. You will have an rv from the Florida Department of health, emergency management, and we will be able to do tests and get a result within 45 minutes or you can take the rv, private to a longterm care facility, test the staff and residents and get the results. Within a matter of hours, you are able to get test results. That is a huge force multiplier. I would hope to be able to announce that at the beginning of the week but certainly next week we will be able to do it. We are seeing fruits from the decision i let the licensed pharmacists administer. Very important to use all the tools at our disposal. Walgreens announced they are opening nine drivethrough sites in florida including one in Orange County, one in orlando and one in winter garden. Those will be convenient. Cbs is getting into the game. They have not announced where their sites will be but they will do it and so is walmart. They are opening five drivethrough sites throughout the state. We look forward to that. We have a new machine we will be debuting in miami. It will clean the ppe. You can decontaminate these masks up to 80,000 a day. To decontaminate, you could wear it 20 times. In terms of the shortage, although i think the supply has started to flow better but a month ago it was difficult to get this stuff. We have it so we can reuse. That will be important going forward. I think that Orange County is poised to help us move forward. We will be safe about it and smart. Will require stepbystep approach. It is not something we can flip a switch on. This is one community that has showed you can get it done. I look forward to continue to working with everybody here. There is so much they have to offer. I am happy to take questions. Thank you for the governor for being here and the Small Business owners who have joined us today. We realize in Central Florida we have a significant portion of the states overall economy. We have been working with a team of dedicated Public Servants and Business Owners for the last couple of weeks to really offer advice as we reopen Orange County itself. I have to thank several individuals here today who have been volunteering their time and efforts. In terms of Orange County, we have 1413 individuals who have tested positive for the virus in our community and 34 people have died as a result. What i am saying to you is we realize this is a deadly virus. As we reopen, we cant forget our possibility to make sure that we reopen in a very judicious way and safe manner. What i have heard from any of these Small Business owners here today who happen to run barbershops and hair salons and nail salons, that they are committed to ensuring, if they are allowed to reopen consistent with the governors executive order, they will do so in a safe manner. For me the guiding principle is to ensure safety first and then the economic recovery there is a happy balance between the two we are trying to measure up to. Floridians have that desire as well. As we move forward, we want to make certain within Orange County these Small Businesses have all of the tools by which to be able to open up successfully. We are the recipients of 243 million in cares act funds from the federal government that can be used for various things. One of the ways we intend to use those dollars is to help Small Businesses acquire the personal protective equipment they need to be able to open up safely. We have one Million Masks within this community. Hopefully we will receive delivery of those and redistribute them. 200,000 different bottles of Hand Sanitizer that will be redistributed within the immunity. We will look to use those dollars to assist Small Businesses with the Recovery Efforts paid we have a Technical Team looking at that within the county that will hopefully come forward with a plan in the future. We are working with the board of county commission to make sure we make appropriate decisions as we move forward. I have had the privilege of talking to our surrounding counties. Here in metropolitan area, our counties have endeavored to be consistent in our approach as we reopen this issue regarding the reopening of hair salons and nail salons and barbershops, one that we mutually have said that we believe is the right fit for our community. It allows us to set the stage for further reopening. We will be working with the Florida Department of health. Dr. Pinot has been with us throughout this battle to ensure that we are looking at data to make certain there is nothing we are doing as we look to reopen that will adversely impact the overall safety of the people who live here. It is important for testing continues throughout the state of florida but we are concerned about the additional testing in our community. We have endeavored to increase the testing. Thanks to additional supplies made available from the state, we have been able to increase the number of testing sites within our county. We have a major site open as we speak at the barnett park where we are testing individuals today. We want to reassure our community that as they are tested, they have the responsibility to then protect themselves and protect others and their families from the potential spread of the virus. While we see the numbers flattening in Orange County, we are not rejoicing to say this pandemic is over. I want to caution people that we are not there. This is still a deadly virus. Our goal is to make certain that while the numbers are low in terms of the overall percentage positive from the test, we want the numbers to be low and get to zero. That is our goal in the community. It is important that we reassess on a regular basis how we are doing and that takes several weeks between each phase. We are in the governors phase one of his reopening process. We know during this time, before we are able to go to phase two and open up even more businesses, we have to make sure the data provided by the Health Care Workers supports that reopening. Thank you to the media for helping us to communicate the message throughout our community. And i will turn it back over to you. Gov. Desantis one other thing on the testing, we have been, every day i am trying to figure out when our antibody we have got a number of companies shipping us antibody tests. We were hoping to get them yesterday. We are literally on the phone with the u. S. Department of transportation about when this stuff will come in and can be delivered from china. It could be in the u. S. Now. The Antibody Testing will be important. That will let us know who has already have the disease. There is many people throughout the country, with a have done these tests, have been determined to have it, and they didnt know they were sick. If you are somebody in health care and have the antibodies, it makes a difference in terms of how you treat patients. Even in Something Like this, if a stylist as the antibody, just important for us to know. Once we get that stuff in, the testing sites, we will start integrating Antibody Testing into the normal diagnostic testing. Diagnostic testing is important. You could test negative tomorrow. Doesnt mean next week you will be negative. If you have the antibodies, that is something you know you have. We will take some questions. [inaudible] realistic timeline . Gov. Desantis we will take this back. I will have my folks work on it. I am in there every day. When everyone else is back monday, we will do that and make sure it is good. Throughout this whole time i said i would rather get it right then get it fast. Doesnt mean we will sit on our hands, but we want to be thorough. Given the guidelines with masks, when people cant socially distance particularly in businesses, and maybe this is for you and the representatives, but how would you look at waxing or beard trimming where the client might not be able to wear a mask during the service . Gov. Desantis that is something we will have to think about. I have never had a beard, but it is different. We will have to look at that. Maybe we start with ways that can be mask first and then move in to that. I would seek counsel on how that works. When you were in orlando last sunday, you mentioned updating the distinguishes between total deaths and individual tested. Do you plan to do that . Gov. Desantis this is how they are doing it. Orange county, it is interesting, they can do this this chart right here , phenomenal. What it will do, they will do number and percent of positive. These counts our lab results by day. The number of people who test positive for the first time divided by the people tested that day excluding people who have previously tested positive. That is the number you look at for Orange County. They are doing that. It is there. A few had people retesting, the percent positive may look different. It could be lower. You would have a few more tests. That is how they are doing this percent positive. 400,000 people have been tested. Does that include retests . Gov. Desantis we are at 450,000 tests. I would think there is not enough people that have been retested. You probably have close to that. Yeah. 400,000 people gov. 400,000 people gov. Desantis 450,000 total test results and more by monday. If you look, there is a lag in the test results. If you have 450,000 results today, the people who have been tested are definitely more than the results we have had because sometimes it takes like a week. Those are people that have come up by this point, have been tested. We know that. [inaudible] gov. Desantis i had given my answer. I understand this is important, but we have answered it. Switching to unemployment, is it true that the requirements for people to reapply every two weeks expires in the coming week and are you going to continue to expand that . Gov. Desantis i would have to look at when we get the order but i think we did it for six weeks. We will look at it. Here is the thing about that. They have to go on the site, click it, a lot of people were still doing it anyway. The reason we did it was less because we were worried about people we know they are going to still be unemployed. It was to take some stress off the system because as more people are going, you are can be processed. What has happened is they have done so many structural changes, the system is holding up a lot better. I am fine with extending it if we need to, but that problem today is a lot better than it was four weeks ago. What they did last weekend you can still apply on pega, but they took down connect from the public interface because they used it just to process claims. They made, last weekend, 500,000 payments by doing that. I talked to the do folks this morning that deo folks this morning and they are doing that. By the time we get to monday, they are using this time to make an impact there. If i have to wait it, we will waive it. I am worried about people going on and clicking that button, you had a month ago you had people would go on and the website was down 75 of the time. They cannot physically do it, so we did not want a check to be held up because somebody was not able to click a button on a website that was not working. The Lieutenant Governor told us that you would make sure that the eligibility concerns were looked into because there were disney employees who had auto enrollment process, other folks who had their applications prepared by people you to work in the Unemployment Office who were deemed ineligible. It seems they meet all the criteria. It is something the administration has asked deo to look into . Gov. Desantis i will hear periodically, we just heard from someone who applied march 18, they have not been paid. We have deo look. If someone is online, deo will get the information, then try to look at that individual. What they found is a lot of times, you go in the system, the application was not complete, there was no social security, maybe they were not employed, there are all these different things. Are people getting paid who applied two weeks go for people who applied a month ago are not getting paid . They tell me it is an automatic thing, once you are processed, it goes. They would not hold anyone back for any arbitrary reason. If somebody is still in the queue, it is because there is something that is not satisfied. That is what they are doing. If somebody has all the criteria and they qualify under the law, they need to be processed. Understand, we cannot change the eligibility under the law. It is what it is. If you are not eligible, you get kicked over, there is another part of relief from the cares act which you can be. You have the state unemployment, federal cares act, that you have another part of people who may have not been working but need relief. You would get kicked over into that area. I want to thank everyone for coming out. I want to thank the mayor, all these great folks, Small Business people, these are important establishments. We want to do what we can to get them up and running in a safe manner. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020]
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