We now leave this program to get you alive briefing of 40 governor ron desantis. Good afternoon i want to think Carlos Mcguire for hosting us in jackson and thank you to mayor carlos and manus to all the work he has done over many months working closely with us in the state government. We came to jackson and i think early march when this pandemic was really starting to pick up steam, at that point i dont know if miamidade had a case, positive, maybe a couple but it was obviously much different than what were finding here. [shouting] over 4000 people have died, you have no plans and youre doing nothing. Shame on you. At that time when we had when we were here we had a whole bunch of concerns about what would end up happening in the next few weeks and months craig we had concerns about testing, we were able to get test, we were not able to get test for all the people who needed them at the time, in fact there were probably hundreds of tests being conducted today statewide and nationally just thousands of tests that we would be doing, that was a huge concern, how do you get testing going and there was a big concern about a lack of personal protective equipment for the hospital employees and people who are working and treatment was a big issue because quite frankly hello new how to handle the virus and whether they would receive treatment that would work and we were monitoring under monitoring Hospital Capacity making sure Hospital Systems would be able to handle what the clinical consequences of the virus, we went into that. With a lot of uncertainties, florida was able to get through march and april wave but we knew with regards to the virus, that. Was not the end or really the beginning of the end but really the end of the beginning. Throughout may in the beginning part of june we were fortunate to be able to have a very low rate of people testing positive, the cases were low, the hospital census was low and that was a good trend that was happening. Then as you got into midjune, you started to see the cases rise and the testing was rising to but the percentage of people who were testing positive instead of being three, four, 5 instead of may or early june was now going up to where it ended up hitting 15 last week. You also saw an increasing amount of traffic starting in the third week of june for people visiting the Emergency Department with covid like illnesses throughout may an early june, it was very low and steady, same thing like influenza illnesses, we see more admissions for coronavirus into a hospital system, particularly here in Miamidade County. I know many floridians are filled with apprehension as they wonder, what does this mean, what are these trends for our health, our families, and for our jobs, how long is this going to go on for, what will happen with things like like kids being in school. I hear you and i along with our federal partners, or local leaders integrate medical community, we are working nonstop to be able to respond to this crisis, we have to address the virus with study results, we cannot get swept away in fear, we have to understand what is going on and understand that we have a long road ahead but we also have to understand that within the context of the moment. A comment on some of the cases because i think we hear a lot about a number of cases and that is true, somebody tested positive, that creates a case, the way the staff is reported. It is also important to understand if you have x number of cases, how many tests were conducted to get to that many tests. For example, the last two days, people have talked about a record number, two days ago and then today not as many but still a significant amount, two days ago the state of florida conducted 144,000 cases. Put that into perspective when we were here in march, we were doing hundreds a day and we got up to doing five or 10000 a day, the whole United States was probably not doing 144,000 test at the beginning of march, that is an enormous amount of test, this todays report was 112,000, 113,000 test, thats a huge number, fortunately although the cases were high without testing, the percentage of people who were testing positive has finally started to decline, we will see if thats a trend or something that is shortlived. Certainly the percentage of people that come in and test positive has stabilized throughout march and april and typically 90 92 of everyone who attesting come back negative as we got into may in the beginning of june, we would typically have 95 of the people who test and come back negative, more recently its been about 85 of the people who test, come back negative and we would like that to get back to 90 of the people testing negative. We think we may have stabilized and we may be going in that direction, it is also the case as you see more cases, we have also seen a decline in the case for totality rate, florida as of today was 1. 5 , thats a fraction of the National Average which is 4 in another state are looking at states that have six, seven, 8 . Thats first entry partially because the folks in florida have learned a lot how to treat this in the fact that many of our cases are occurring in people who are low risk, people in their 20s, 30s an early 40s, nevertheless that is something that they are mentioning. Were in a situation where were taking action every day to be able to address the issue with the spread of covid19 saturday we were able to get the therapeutic remdesivir dropped in for the hospitals across the state, that was a request because even though they were due as shipment coming this week or next week they wanted to have enough because they were using it and with the uptick in people in the hospital was needed and that was able to drop and we will make sure that supply is replenished as much as we can going forward. Were also assisting at the state level with places throughout florida but predict lee in south florida with personnel, particularly nurses and we will talk about, if you look at the number of beds available, countywide or statewide, theres a lot of beds available. In statewide, there is 13 or 14000 beds available, the key is having the requisite personnel to be able to address, not just Covid Patients but people to come in for things other than covid so weve already dedicated 100 personnel that the state had on contract basis to jackson and miamidade, we put 100 on the way in the tampa bay area and we have a total of 1000 that will be parceled out which was our initial mobilization and were also going ahead and mobilizing another 2000. Some will be used to support our covid only Long Term Care facilities. Some will be able to go the traditional long care facilities to sub in for staff who may test positive and need to no longer be around the residence. Personnel is probably the number one thing that i have heard from our hospitals in her medical community, we are delivering and we have a request pending with the federal government and hhs for their teams to come down and assist effort. We are expanding the amount of beds in our covid only nursing facilities, florida from the very beginning prohibited discharging covid positive patients into a nursing home from a hospital if they were still sick with the virus, we also later as we went on and saw covid positive patients being transferred from a nursing home if they were happy to test positive. Sometimes that means they get sent to the hospital and a lot of times they are not necessarily in need of hospitalization, their medically stable but they need to be isolated. We now have 14 facilities and seemed to be adding some every day under the leadership of secretary mary, we are rapidly expanding beds including the Miami Care Center hearing date in were expanding in broward and palm beach counties, this will provide a safe place where covid positive resident of the longterm care facility can be isolated if theyre in the hospital medically stable but still contagious, they can be discharged safely to these facilities without endangering the other residents in their home longterm care facility, were also doing and in the midst of getting results back with testing every worker at a longterm care facility, all staff almost 200,000 staff on every other week basis. Every two weeks theyre getting swabbed, were sending it in and were getting the results back. We got the results back for over 100,000 of the staff and fortunately the percent positive has been under 3 and thats probably lower than we anticipated given the prevalence in the Community Seems to be higher than 3 . That will be an important way to protect those who are the most vulnerable to covid19, residents in longterm care facility represent 50 of the covid related for tallies in florida and many other states. We are looking to help fortify Lab Resources at hospitals, when people come into the hospital if they have covid symptoms, its important to the hospital know if there positive so they can be treated accordingly, hospitals are running low on the Lab Chemicals and were working with the white house to try to get more supplies down to the state of florida for our hospitals, we understand there is a need for faster results for people going through things like the drivethrough testing site and the fact of the matter is, theres a lot of testing going on throughout the state of florida and you have 700 plus thousand test today that are being processed mostly by commercial labs, they are backed up, when people go through a lot of times theyre not getting results back for seven days, obviously we want to improve that and what were going to start doing here in dade, broward and Orange County is establishing dedicated lanes for tickly for people who are symptomatic where they can then test, swab and go to a lab that can turn it around quicker so they get the results. We will be working on that which is very, very important. We have capacity, throughout the Health System and is very important for people to understand, they plan for these types of eventualities in their keeping their senses very stable even as covid has represented increasing part of the senses, we have a special obligation to protect those most formable to covid19, we are obviously doing a lot more than any other state in terms of protecting the longterm care facilities, we will continue to do that and folks who are not on longterm care facility, that are 65 and older are an increased risk, we have advice since march that they limit contact outside the home as much as they can and avoid crowds, i think its important to listen and follow the guidance that is put out by local officials such as mayor gimenez in here and Miamidade County, that means being diligent about wearing the facial coverings and following the other directives that he and some of the other officials have put on. It will make a difference if everyone does their part you got the state, we have also stressed the need to avoid the 3c use when it comes to social distancing. That is close spaces where your packed in tight and poor ventilation, that is a good venue for the virus to spread in crowded places, the more people that you have together the more likely to see a spread in really close to staying contact, most of the infections incur in the home because you close contact among family members, that is something to think about whether your with friends and family, that is a vector for transmission. We are leaving this program for live coverage of the Senate Session and we will return to the briefing when the senate gavels out. The senate wrapping up the presiding officer the senate will come to order. The parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. The parliamentarian washington, d. C, july 13, 2020. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tim scott, a senator from the state of south carolina, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed chuck grassley, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the Senate Stands adjourned until stands adjourned until the senate wrapping up the session of the week, theyve another one thursday at 1030. Members of that next week for legislative business, they can be monday at three later that afternoon they hold a confirmation vote for russell to be director of the office of management and budget. Next week more work on the Defense Authorization bill. We now return to the briefing by Florida Governor ron desantis. We have taken measures in new rules and regulations due to the curfew to try to drive down the levels of positivity rates so we can start to reduce the number of people that we have in residents that are in the hospital. We do not want to overload the Hospital Capacity of Miamidade County, the governor has been great and adding Additional Resources here in Miamidade County to the hospitals, he will continue to do that and also thank you for your efforts in bringing the medicines that we need in the resources that we need down here. Very appreciate of that. We have to follow the rules. If you follow the rules that we all do and what were supposed to do, we can drive the level of contagions down here in Miamidade County. Contact tracing is something that we need to have, we need additional contract tracers, in the end until we start the drive down the contingent level here in miamidade, you cannot get a handle on it. Again it is up to us to reduce the level, its up to us to protect each other, it is up to us to protect the economy if we have further rise in the contagion more and more people going to the hospital we have to take additional measures now whip to rollback the openings that we had in the past please follow the rules and change social distancing, washing hands, dont touch her face with your hands and if we all do that, we can drive the contagion level down and stop the rise in the number of people going to the hospital and we can get back to normal much faster. Thank you, governor for all your efforts, thank you for courtney dinner efforts with all the hospitals and as a governor said they are very creative in how to create additional capacity in miamidade. Im sure we will have less and less of the elected surgeries being conducted, most of them have been stopped to create additional capacity and so we are not there yet, it is up to us to make sure we never get there. With that i want to turn it over to the president and ceo. Thank you mayor, i want to thank you, governor for being here, i also want to thank you for your support. And for all the support that youre working, i know youre working on the reagents which is something there right now is extremely near and dear that test every patient that walks in the door. We are entering the fifth month of having Covid Patients. This is about four months ago you were absolutely right the time that you got here and around the time that we had to push patients in the door. That makes it very, very difficult for all of our employees specifically healthcare workers that are dealing with the patients on a daytoday basis and the stress that goes with that, its extremely difficult and it works through them and every other employee in the hospital. We have seen a dramatic increase of patients over the last 30 days, about three or four weeks ago we were around 200 patients in today were exceeding 400 patients of which about 100 are nicus. The challenge to that not necessarily running out everybody covers the fact that you have 70 patients you cannot get anywhere. We have not been able to manage from the 200 400 number by maintaining our senses the same. How have we done that you might ask, the fact that we reduce the number of surgeries we are doing. By doing that we are getting less nonCovid Patients in the door. Our senses throughout the system runs in the mid1300 range for this time of the year. Weve been able to maintain that for the last month from the fact that we went from 200 400, a higher percentage of Covid Patients today than we did a month ago. It is very stressful for every employee we have to make sure we have the ppe and make sure everybody is covered and protected. The three things that we work on everyday which is extremely important priorities to make sure that we have made only the people that need to be admitted and we discharge the people once they dont need hospitalization as quickly as possible to make a bed available for the next patient and last but certainly not least to make sure all of our employees are protected and only in the hospital but in the community. So we can keep working. We have seen an increase of employees that have a higher percentage in the normal percentage of our employees is not as big of an issue and having the extra nurses that has helped us a lot but we are managing the numbers, is not as the governors and the numbers of beds, we have the beds available, and to do that we have to make sure not only that we have the extra nurses in the state provided us but to make sure our employees continue to work and make sure they do the things that are necessary. We saw for a while the number of patients becoming younger. We saw that for a while and now the same number of younger patients are being admitted but because increases happened in that increase we saltwater people coming back in and the younger people have been contaminated and making it difficult for the older people. On a percentage basis, the number of people has reduced but the number of people are the same. And those of the challenges and we are still doing some surgeries and we have a lot of patients in covid is not the only disease in miami and many of these people have been deferred for too long and now have become emergent patients. This is a tough balance and were dealing with today, we focus every day on our employees and the employees are focusing on the patient the best we can do. But i will tell you, the mayor joined me in the four clock meeting with all the hospital ceos from out south florida and were all going to the same balance of balancing our senses with bringing in more covert patients, we can do that for a certain period of time we cannot do that forever. The message when you hear the governor and the mayor, we need to be wearing masks, that is absolute answer, its not where we should shut everything down, the issue is important, if we can get everyone to be socially distant and wear a mask, thats only way we will be able to reduce the number being in hospitals and being able to deal with the entire disease and reduce the death happening in our community. That is all i have to say, thank you very much and we will leave it up to you. I would stress after talking to a very hospital that ive spoken to, we saw a decline in people seeking medical care for heart and stroke in march and april because i dont open it was fear of catching coronavirus or fear they would not be room in the hospitals, what that has led to is a patient in the icu for those conditions are now in worse shape had they sought the care, please go seek the care that you need particular for the really serious elements like heart and stroke delaying that is that can be good for your health and obviously we want the coronavirus is important, its not the only issue as it relates to Peoples Health and when you are talking about heart and stroke, those are major drivers of poor health outcome, please seek the care that you need. I want to thank carlos for having us, think you mayor for working hard and really collaborating with the state and we are here to help, we will do more, were working with the federal government that employs additional teams because i think its about the people power in the medical perspective, i know you guys have capacity and you have those good folks here. [inaudible question] all of those, the nursing home is probably the number one thing that you can do to reduce the risk of mortality, if you look at our mortality statistics for coronavirus it shoots up winter 75m plus and usually because you have one or more comorbidities. Retesting staff at Nursing Homes for example and if the staff test positive, the residence may be tested. Fortunately most of them test negative. If you want to test positive, they need to be isolated like the covid only nursing facility. If not, it will spread and that is the most honorable population that it will spread to. That is a huge way to not only reduce the spread but to protect those who are the most honorable of the spread. I wish if you could just stop it you could stop it. But there is a huge difference between a 21yearold and 85yearold when it comes to the coronavirus. That is really, really important in terms of strategy to protect the most vulnerable and reduce infection amongst those who are most accessible to negative outcome. [inaudible question] a couple things, one is demand, i was going around in may begging people to get tested because traffic was pretty slow and a lot of our sites and we are operating close to 50 sites in all the hospitals are testing everyone that comes in the door so you have way more capacity, we basically have a testing Industrial Complex and the labs arent quick as turnaround, the nursing home test while all of them have not been reported yet to continually come and pray thats part of it as well pray theres a lot of factors, when we went into may, we wanted to expand testing because we thought it was important as we went forward and to prepare for whatever the virus would do after we got through march and april and we thought we could go to ten, 15000 test today to 30000 test a day, that would really be doing good, i think were probably averaged in the last week probably close to 100,000 test a day. When youre looking at the cases, understand we are diagnosing a lot of people who are completely asymptomatic or very minimal symptoms. Thats a good thing because then those individuals can be isolated, they know they have it may be contagious till but it does not necessarily mean all the people that are going to test that are ill, a fraction of people go more for employment reasons, another fraction that may feel they were exposed to somebody who tested positive. So we have the ability to do that. It is much different to look at cases today than it was in march or so, some of the state to have bigger outbreaks. They had high cases but they were doing 20 25000 case and getting 10000 positive. It is a little bit different in terms of whats going on here and now. We have a lot of Testing Capacity and we have a criteria which is basically if you want to test and come to a site and do it, if there is no symptomatic screen and no h screen, that is generating cases that are not clinically consequential but important to know. I think we will continue to do the longterm care every two weeks so that will be enough and will see what the traffic looks like in miamis been a little different, theyve had pretty consistent traffic on the test site under ed visits, we had a week to find statewide and covid like ed visits. We have been flat all through may, beginning of june and then it went up encrusted in the last part of june and plateaued for a little bit and now it has come down and we hope it is a six or seven day trend statewide and we hope to see that immersing good indicators even though when the sunday numbers came out in the number of cases, i was looking inside install trends where you see positivity going back down into pretty key counties throughout Central Florida and other parts of florida. We look through those trends as well in summer positive and i think her busy entered biggest concern is south florida so we worked hard to get the medicine and this is just the beginning of the staff support, were here to do more as you need to do more and we understand the challenge. [inaudible question] we are mostly private labs, we have three state labs, they do a limited number, they are doing about a thousand today which is helpful after the 24 hour turnaround but with the numbers we are looking at, we had set up to have one of the big machines like carlos tried to get one here, we wanted to get them this summer and now theyre like you can get a machine and february, we will need as much in february hopefully. It is really working with private labs. What we did with the longterm care is we have a company, its a Newer Company and its a self swab test, you send it directly to them, they run it and send it back and report every day, that is what were looking to do, Something Like that for the symptomatic drivethrough test takers, someone that exudes exhibiting, we want to know if you have it or not so we can do it and get a quicker turnaround on that subset, the problem with the state labs, we went from testing 100,000 today as a country and even as we got into april and may we were 400,000. In the last six weeks we are now in 700,000. Florida alone we tested more in one day than some other countries have tested. Taiwan has tested less than 100,000 people. That is the challenge. They have limited capacity. So they are getting backed up in hundreds of thousands sent every day and the turnaround time is just not what we would wanted to be, we were hoping we wanted 48 hours, that was our agreement with some of the labs and by the second week of june, there was no 48 hours, it was basically at least five days, these people are 70s, the problem with that if youre a some dramatic and you come back positive on the seventh day, you will probably not be isolating if you dont have symptoms pretty will probably wait for the results. The goal is to stop asymptomatic spreads. I think you can also test negative on day seven but you couldve been infected on day six it could be a false insecurity. Were working on what we can do. This is one way, we have the money and we can pay if theres a way to pay we would pay and get it turned around quicker. This is a problem all around the country. [inaudible question] obviously we want to have Safe Environments across the state and weve obviously had a lot of operations that have been going on with government and private sector businesses and everything and i think all of those have wanted to take the appropriate precautions. I would just note you are looking at the schools, i think one, a lot of parents want to have the option to send them back but i also think parents should have the option to do virtual if they want to. I believe in school choice, the science on it is pretty clear about kids being extremely low risk when it comes to this virus. Not only that but they are not considered vectors of transmission and thats been shown in sweden and switzerland and iceland did a study. They are all coming out the same way and just look at that and then go. But i think i think these countries are showing that it can be done safely but i do think parents should have the ability if they want to. Yes, sir. [inaudible question] heres the thing, im not going to dictate how everything goes, you know miami is looking at a different situation, you will have a lot of situations around the state that will open up and i will be at. They have faced a similar epidemic like Miamidade County. I told the commissioner of education we will work with these districts collaboratively, understand we have a very diverse state, that has been my approach to almost all of the stuff, recognizing that the response here has got to be different than it would be in different parts of the state and i think theres other parts of the state for example with coronavirus but its been effective for their area. I think the same thing should be true here. My fear on this is the amount of damage that will be done if kids have no options to give untrained get back to school. We put a lot of effort into Virtual Education in florida and we mitigated the damage better than a lot of the states. There is a gap that has developed, i think its disproportionately hurt are lowincome students from lowincome families and i dont know what the in point would be if you say they are not going to go back to school. You have to look at what are the risks involved, its very low and you can look at the adult and say those can be managed in other areas and say what are the risks if they dont have an outlet to do this. I think those are profound. Not just in Educational Achievement that may be lost but mental health, if you look at the social fabric, people being able to develop and participate in activities like sports, i think it is very, very important. At the same time we have to recognize its a big diverse state and i am willing to do that. Federal government did it for us. I talked with carlos, pretty much everyone i have talked to has said we can expand within our hospitals. We have the beds, statewide weve been between ten and 15000 beds consistently empty for the last three weeks even if we see traffic coming for coronavirus, i think they have the personnel that they need, i think they would prefer a standard of care here and i think you can do that. Part of that was thinking about maybe isolating people who are in multigenerational household, the problem is we will not force anyone to do it but if you did have a situation like that i know jared is working with folks down here about offering hotels, what we are seeing, you have somebody in a household in other generations and when youre in close contact under the same roof, the chance of his writing is very high and the question would be with someone be willing to isolate at state expense in a hotel for a week or two and some may not. I will not force anyone out of their home but i think thats an option to stop the spread within a household if you have vulnerable individuals. [inaudible question] basically at the beginning in march we took a number of steps to prepare and there is a lot of uncertainty, we entered in the contract with companies that provided additional staff support, these work with companies to do this all the time, its no different than what hospital would do and we have folks under contract, we have not ha had to execute but after hearing from the folks in southern florida we thought we should do it. We executed the thousand that we had, jackson will have their hundred by the end of this week and they have half of him now, we will be deploying 1000 around the state, itll be in the covid only lawn care facilities and some will be an actual lawn care facilities if someone test positive for number of staff test positive in send new staff for the residence. And we will also do another 2000 on top of that, dear mosque with has not lined up, we think there is demand from the agency of Healthcare Administration from g home related staff and we dont know that we will have a demand for all 3000 but our view from the beginning, lets be prepared and better to be prepared and not needed then not to be prepared at all. I want to thank the mayor, i will come back down tomorrow and meet with carlos and we will do more than we can to help and i wanted talk to folks in the white house to move forward but i really appreciate the hard work that you are seen throughout Miamidade County, this is the toughest part of the epidemic in our state and i know they have been working on it for a long time, weve been helping you a long time and we will get through it, your guys are a strong city and county and youre really a great engine for the state of florida. It is not necessarily going to be easy but im 100 confident we will get through this. Thank you governor. Tonight on the communicators, democratic congressman mike doyle chair of the communication and Technology Subcommittee talks about this information on social media and the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on telecommunication. One of these platforms, take a look at the country they created, things have changed in the culture of this country and what exists in our country is chiefly being done by social media, its crazy and you identify peoples political affiliation but based on certain actions of every day on the internet. Mike doyle tonight at eight eastern on the communicators on cspan2. A house hearing on minority owned businesses and access to Financial Aid approved by congress. Many do not have enough income to cover three months of expenses with her income and some banks are not taken on new borrowers. Officials with hispanic commerce testify about their concerns. From february to april 2020. The rates for minority and businesses are significant we hire with 41 of blackowned businesses, 32 of the teanecks home businesses and 20 of asian home businesses. Closed over the same