Covid-19 Update | April 15 at 9:03 PM

OK folks, so tonight’s coronavirus update is brought to you by U-Haul, helping do it yourself movers since 1945. Speaking of moving, tonight’s update is going to start with two expressions you’ve all heard, one related to COVID and one that is not specifically related, but applicable. So, we’ve all heard the expression “flatten the curve.” People have short memories, so I’ve pasted the CDC image below. The line under which we were told to stay home in order to flatten the curve beneath was hospital system capacity. If we didn’t stay home and flatten the curve, we wouldn’t have enough beds, ICU space, health care workers and ventilators to take care of all the COVID patients all over the nation. We all needed to come together and do our part so that Doctor Smith isn’t having to pick between the 85-year-old retired teacher and the 44-year-old father of three supporting his family. That was happening in Italy last month and it was hard to question the wisdom and sense that it made at the time. Well my friends, today marked the first day since March that New York City had a net decline in hospital census, so not fewer hospitalizations, but more discharges than admissions. And if you have been following my updates, Florida’s hospitals are not only empty, but they are laying off their nurses and other employees. Why do you think there are so many Tik Tok video’s with nurses dancing around? The ones overrun with patients certainly wouldn’t have time to be on social media. Even the faulty IHME model that led to prolonged shutdowns agrees that we reached peak hospital resource use five days ago. So, mission accomplished and back to school and work, right? This brings us to our second expression, “moving the goalposts,” which is what the media and certain politicians are doing now. We are not at risk of having overrun hospitals, we are now supposed to stay at home to save every possible life until a vaccine is approved in 12 months. Not feasible and not part of what most of us agreed to. The media believes we have a short memory. They think we can be fooled. But it’s up to all of us to say “NO.” As you can see from The White House and The Governor’s office, President Trump and Gov. Desantis are making plans to open our nation and this state for business. I want to point out that no person under the age of 25 in the state of Florida has died from COVID. The only people who aren’t perfectly safe back in school are teachers and administrators over the age of 65 or who have major medical problems. These people should continue to voluntarily isolate themselves at home. The same is true for our workforce. The economy sheds one million jobs a day that we aren’t working. The longer this goes, the deeper in debt our country becomes and the harder it will be for all these businesses to get open again. We are at a point where we cannot let the media convince 80% of the population that its unsafe to go outside. The ill effects of the lockdowns are being felt disproportionately by children. I shared it earlier today, but a hospital in Houston has reported its third death by child abuse in four weeks and this represents a 600% increase over the expected number. Domestic violence, drug abuse, and alcoholism have also been reported to be on the rise. We also know with joblessness and substance abuse comes mental health conditions which will cause suicide. And it turns out that releasing violent criminals from prison has been a really bad idea and a Tampa man was murdered by one of these formerly incarcerated people. So, apologies for all the commentary and less actual data, but I felt this message was important to put out there. Now a quick and dirty on the data; two days in a row the nationwide death total has jumped way over anything previously seen. This is despite the number of cases increasing by 5% each of the last four days, the lowest daily case numbers since the start of the outbreak. These higher numbers seem to coincide with the liberal counting of anything that might be covid as covid. Almost 60% of the deaths are from NY/NJ/CT/MI all states that have been on “lock down” for three or more weeks. California has been on lockdown longer than a month now and they had their highest day of deaths ever at 82. It really makes one question the effectiveness of lockdowns on number of deaths. Moving back and looking at Florida, 891 cases and 43 deaths puts us on a really good trajectory. Our cases have receded from the peak for five days now and we still have a relatively low number of deaths. By comparison, Ohio which has been on lockdown for two more weeks than us has more deaths per capita. We are really beating the odds for some reason that seems completely unrelated to economic shutdown. Last, Bay County had one more case; so, in the last seven days we had a total of five cases. At 39 total, we are the lowest in the state and lower than any state in the nation. And based on the amount of traffic I see out I don’t think it’s all related to extreme social distancing. I think the end of the week is going to bring good news to all of us who have been wanting to see an end to this shutdown and until tomorrow night let’s keep the U-Hauls away from those goalposts.