Florida announced nearly 9,000 new daily coronavirus cases on Friday, breaking its previous record and sparking new concerns about a surge across the South. Now almost all of Florida is blanketed in red, indicating that those parts of the state are seeing no downward trend. The maps also show significantly fewer counties across the United States trending down now than there were a month ago.
Florida’s Department of Health on Friday morning confirmed 8,942 new cases, nearly double the previous daily record, set on Wednesday. The case total in the state now stands at 122,960, with more than 3,400 deaths. About 81 percent of adult intensive care unit beds were full as of Wednesday.
Rebekah Jones, the former supervisor for the state’s coronavirus data dashboard, was fired in May after claiming that her supervisors were attempting to make her manipulate data for political reasons. She claimed this week that Florida officials were continuing to twist data to make their response look better.
When the Miami Herald asked Gov. Ron DeSantis about Jones’s claims this week, he said the newspaper was “chasing the conspiracy bandwagon.”
On Friday morning, Halsey Beshears, secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, announced that the state was prohibiting the drinking of alcohol at bars in an attempt to stop crowds from gathering. Portending this week’s news, a viral story earlier this month told of a Jacksonville woman and 15 of her friends who contracted the disease after gathering at a bar on June 6.
“I think we were careless and we went out into a public place when we should not have. And we were not wearing masks. I think we had a whole ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. The state opens back up and said everybody was fine, so we took advantage of that,” said Erika Crisp, who works in health care.
For continue reading........
https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-r...165529121.html