before landfall? the county s own emergency plan suggests evacuations should have happened much sooner than that. republican senator rick scott says he want answers. every loss of life, you have to say what could you do differently next time should it ever happen again. should that have been done differently? we re going to find out. i want to learn what do we need to do to make sure we don t lose a life? this week, joe biden is expected to head here to florida to see the devastation, after warning that ian could be the deadliest hurricane in florida s history. leila, you know, we ve been talking to local law enforcement officials. they are warning the public that this death toll could go higher.
as to when they can get back to 100% power restoration, and they re working on housing to figure out how to help those displaced by hurricane ian get to a safe shelter for now. jim? all right, leila santiago. there s so many of those heartbreaking stories. i heard some of them first hand myself earlier today. it s so difficult to listen to folks pour out their hearts how their lives and homes have been destroyed. but at least some of these folks, you know, they can tell us that they are still standing and still with us. that s what they re holding on to. thank you so much. lee county officials have been fielding questions about the timing of the evacwagsz orders that came more than a day after the forecast met the county s criteria. everybody wants to focus on a plan that might have been done differently. i stand 100% with my county
still not enough data on the johnson & johnson shot. so as the delta variant surges across the united states, two states, florida and louisiana, have the highest rate of new cases per capita in the country. yeah. the rise in cases comes as local leaders in florida push back against governor desantis s mask mandate. leila santiago has more. reporter: boris, christi, florida reporting more covid-19 cases in the past week than any other seven-day period in this pandemic. new numbers coming in from the department of health here in florida and they show that florida s reporting 151,000, more than 151,000 new cases over the past week here in florida. and here in broward county the broward teachers union telling us that two teachers as well as a teacher s assistant have died because of covid-19 complications. all three of them unvaccinated as the chairman of the school
board points out, the school year here hasn t even started yet. let s just be honest, when we started covid we had leadership that first didn t even want to acknowledge that it was a real pandemic and that it was deadly. then all of the false information started to spread to make the vaccine suspect then, saying it was warp speed and all these kind of things that put fear and questions in people s mind that they didn t feel comfortable being vaccinated. and now we re paying a deadly consequence for it because people are dying. reporter: in a letter to the state education commissioner, the superintendent here in broward county is doubling down saying she prepares to move forward with a mask mandate that does not have an opt out for parents. something the governor said is noncompliant with his executive order that prohibits mask mandates. boris, christi? leila, thank you for that report.
leila santiago, thank you for the reporting. now to orange county, florida, where some of the nation s biggest tourist attractions draw millions of visitors. so the mayor there has just issued a state of emergency and an ultimatum to about 4,000 non union county employees. they have until august 31st to get a first vaccine shot, and they must be fully vaccinated by the end of september. orange county, florida, just reported the highest number of covid cases in a single day, more than 1,300. earlier this week the mayor said his county is in a, quote, crisis mode. mayor jerry demings joins us now from orlando. mayor, thank you for taking the time to be with us. how did your county get back into a crisis mode? well, thank you, first, for inviting me on the show. we are a county that has been open for business now for better than a year. we were one of the first to do so, and we were able to get our numbers down really low for an