April 29th 2020
By: Staff
Governor DeSantis spoke at a press conference today to update the State on COVID-19 cases and the plan to open Florida. Gov. DeSantis said, “
“What is our biggest obstacle. Fear, fear of the unknown. Fear sparked by constant doom and gloom and hysteria that is permeated our culture for the last six weeks. For example, we’ve seen a sudden drop in the number of people who are seeking medical care for heart problems and stroke symptoms not because these common ailments have all of a sudden disappeared, but because people are terrified of going to the hospital because of the coronavirus. This will have huge health consequences in the very near future. It will almost assuredly result in excessive fatalities. Fear is our enemy. Now, we’re a resourceful people with a can-do spirit. We can do what we need to do to protect our vulnerable populations from the coronavirus while taking safe smart steps toward rebuilding.”
“There have been wide-ranging and punitive orders issued in various regions of this country. People have rights the government needs to protect health, but we should not going go beyond what is necessary to do that.” said Desantis. “We also want public confidence. One, One of the reasons we’re going to take a very slow and methodical approach is because we want to make sure we build as much confidence as possible with the general public.”, said DeSantis
“We’re also going to be partnering with local communities, which is what we did from the very beginning. We knew the epidemic was going to be different and southeast Florida and we work with those counties differently and treated them differently than we would and say Jacksonville or Northeast or Northwest Florida where the epidemic was significantly less.”
The Governor continued with COVID-19 cases, ventilator capacity, and ICU beds, “We were at 2000 cases, they predicted 460,000. Projections say the state could run out of ICU beds by April 14th, very scary if you’re in need to be in intensive care. You need certain types of treatment and there’s no beds available, what’s gonna happen?”
That didn’t happen in the State of Florida. We have 36% of the ICU beds in the State empty.
During the conference, the Governor discussed the opening of Florida in phases and the details of Phase1.
Phase 1 includes:
-Distance learning is going to remain in place
-Not allowing visitors to long-term care facilities.
-Elective surgeries are able to resume and that’s going to take place statewide
-Churches opened, social distancing in place
-Restaurants allow outdoor seating with social distance
-Restaurants indoors, they can do 25 percent capacity with the CDC recommended spacing.
-Retail at 25% indoor capacity, have to follow the CDC recommendations for social.
-Expanded testing to include 30k-40k test per-day