Covid-19 Update | April 8 at 8:48 PM

Tonight’s coronavirus update is brought to you by HCA, the hospital system with a lot of empty beds right now. So first, let’s talk about the IHME hospital use and mortality model that the White House has used to make its recommendations to keep up strict social distancing through the end of April. It has now been edited twice in the last 3 days and maybe they are going to finally get it right. The bottom line on this model is that their death estimate is down to 60,000 (from 100k) and their resource utilization model shows that pretty much every state outside of NY, NJ, MA, MI, and CT have plenty of existing ICU beds to deal with this health crisis. The original call for business closures and healthy people staying at home was because our hospitals were going to be overrun nationwide, like in Italy, and we all needed to do this to flatten the curve. Some of this was about the number of deaths, but I think the overriding factor was our healthcare system couldn’t withstand the onslaught of patients. Well, we’re here at the peak of the epidemic per all the experts this week and outside of Detroit and the NYC metro area, we aren’t seeing it. 9,100 of the country’s 14,700 deaths (62%) are from NY, NJ, CT, and MI. This has been a problem largely confined to a few metro areas. We have great data here in Florida to really drive some points home. Today we had just 27 deaths in the state (the new IHME model estimated 56 today) and total new cases were 951 (just a 6% increase in total cases). It looks like we peaked here two days ago and our hospital’s ICUs and beds in the state continue to sit empty. Total bed availability statewide is 44% and ICU bed availability is 39% as of tonight. In the three counties with nearly 60% of all of our state’s cases and deaths (Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach), they have even slightly higher bed availability. Hospitals across the nation are already having to furlough employees as they have canceled all of their elective procedures, patients being told to stay home empty out their outpatient imaging and lab services, and even primary care offices sit empty. Due to faulty modeling, we instituted policies to prepare for an onslaught of COVID-19 patients that never came. In many ways, COVID-19 has done far less to harm our health care system nationwide than the orders to stop normal hospital activity. The good news is there is time to fix the damage. The media is still hell-bent on reporting what I call “fear porn” and keeping everyone on lockdown (captive audience = ratings). Social distancing and school closures are one thing, but people under 65 who are healthy really should be allowed to work in the very near future. Assuming we have continued good news for the rest of the week and this weekend, we are very near the time to tell the county commissioners to open the beaches for business (short term rentals are banned through the month, so Spring Breakers aren’t coming). It will be more than safe for locals to enjoy. Call your state Senator and state Representative and the Governor’s office and tell them you are ready to get back to work. Call your Congressman, US Senators, and even the White House has an email address and tell them we are ready to get back to work, get this economy moving again, and make America fearless and great once again. I appreciate the likes and even the dissent, but if you agree it’s about to be time for action. Let them all know, it’s not as bad as we thought, thankfully. We did what we thought was necessary but it’s time to move on with our lives. Have a great night and I’ll be back again tomorrow.