Covid-19 Update | April 7 at 11:32 PM

Tonight’s corona virus update is brought to you by the St. Andrew’s Bay Yacht Club, a great place to pick up a Cove Burger to go! So, let’s start local tonight and then go global. Bay county has 25 cases of CoVID-19 and we have a 7% positive test rate. This is very low, meaning it’s not because we haven’t been getting people tested. It’s because there aren’t many older, immune compromised, or health care workers with symptoms which would lead to testing. If we weren’t getting enough people tested there would be a much higher rate of positive tests. Florida has a 10% positive test rate. New York has a 42% positive test rate, just to give you an idea of how much more prevalent it is there. With only one case in the last few days, we sit at 147 cases per million, which is back to lower than the average case rate of all 50 states. We are also lower than most every county in Florida, so we are safer in Bay County than anywhere else! On the state level, Florida sits at 686 cases per million. South Florida’s big three counties still account for almost 60% of the entire state’s cases and deaths. Despite this fact, all of the state hospitals and even those in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach county have 30-40% of their hospital and ICU beds empty, awaiting an onslaught of CoVID-19 cases that have yet to make it to their doors. On a national level, the IHME model overshot its estimate for a third day in a row. They estimated 2140 deaths and the number came in at 1970. Their total number of deaths didn’t even match the lowest estimate in their range. Their lowest estimate of deaths through August is 49,000 meaning we are on track to do even better. This is despite the astonishing revelation at today’s White House Task Force briefing in which Dr. Birx admitted that they are counting any person that dies with a positive CoVID-19 test as a CoVID-19 death, regardless of the true cause of death. This is not normal. A person with CoVID-19 that dies of respiratory failure or sepsis or multisystem organ failure is and should be appropriately called a CoVID-19 death, but a heart attack or stroke in a patient with CoVID-19 would not typically be tagged as a death from the virus. It certainly wouldn’t be counted as a flu death. What is happening here is the models are off. They shut down the economy based on flawed models and now everything has to be counted as CoVID-19 so they don’t look stupid. I have had faith in the numbers until today. Now we have to question everything. We have become the anti-China. China likely lied about their numbers on the downside and we have basically admitted to lying about the deaths on the upside. Good news is even with the extremely generous classification of all death with CoVID-19 as caused by the virus, we are still below the models. We are easily on track to being open for ALL business in May. I am blessed to be considered essential, but for those who aren’t I feel your pain and I am on your side. We can and have saved a significant number of lives by agreeing to follow the government’s recommendations this month, but our lives and the economy need to restart this May and not even consider doing this again in the fall. Look out for another update tomorrow night!