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- [Rob] Coming up next, the number of COVID cases and deaths jumps in Florida while the Governor continues to refuse mask mandates, setting up a conflict with the President and local government leaders around the state.

Our guests are Jay Wolfson with the Morsani College of Medicine, Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, Deborah Tamargo, President of the Florida Federation of Republican Women, and Pinellas County Administrator, Barry Burton.

Next on "Florida This Week."

(bright music) Welcome back, Florida has become a hotbed of new COVID-19 infections, setting new records for hospitalizations in the past week.

- [Rob] In total, the state has seen more than 2.6 million cases and 39,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

And according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more children were hospitalized with the virus in Florida than in any other state this week.

Governor Ron DeSantis downplayed the spike in COVID-19 cases and repeated his vow not to impose a mask mandate or any business restrictions.

- We're not shutting down.

We're gonna have schools open.

We're protecting every Floridian's job in this state.

We're protecting people's small businesses.

These interventions have failed time and time again throughout this pandemic, not just in the United States, but abroad, they have not stopped the spread.

And particularly with Delta-- - [Rob] He even blamed immigrants on the Southern border for spreading the coronavirus.

- You have hundreds of thousands of people pouring across every month, and it's not just from Mexico.

In fact, it's rarely from Mexico.

You have over 100 different countries.

- [Reporter] DeSantis says he expects hospitalizations to drop in the next couple of weeks, claiming the spike is seasonal, as Floridians spend more time indoors to escape the summer heat.

The Governor has defended his response to COVID-19, which is focused on vaccinating seniors and nursing home residents, saying that fewer Floridians are dying now than a year ago.

However, increased deaths from COVID tend to lag behind the rise in cases by a few weeks.

President Biden criticized DeSantis and other officials who've moved to block the reimposition of mask mandates.

- I say to these governors, please help.

But if you aren't going to help at least get out of the way.

- [Rob] Many Florida hospitals are facing staffing and space shortages.

A Florida Hospital Association poll indicated 60% of hospitals expect to have staffing shortages in the next week.

Additionally, 23% reported that they will have to expand their patient care areas in the next week into parts of their facilities not currently used for patients.

Hospitals across the state have also been forced to cancel nonemergency surgical procedures.

Governor DeSantis is running for reelection next year, while also eyeing a 2024 presidential bid.

A central tenant of his national image among conservatives is his refusal to impose mask mandates or vaccine requirements or business restrictions.

- Well, joining us now is Dr. Jay Wolfson, a Professor of Public Health at USF and the Senior Associate Dean for Health Policy at the Morsani School of Medicine, and Dr. Wolfson, welcome back.

Great to see you.

- Always good to be with you, Rob, thank you.

- So, Jay, I want to ask you about previous interventions.

Did previous lockdowns and the previous mask mandates that we had going back a few months, did they work?

- You know, they worked in the beginning when the pandemic first hit Tampa and Florida, we had very little knowledge of what was going on, and we certainly didn't have a vaccine.

We didn't have any pharmaceutical interventions.

And the best thing we could do to protect ourselves was to isolate.

And when we did that, the rate of the disease went down dramatically.

And then in the early summer, late spring, when we opened things up again, it rose.

So, the initial period of time we did it, it definitely had an effect, but the limit is you can't keep things locked down forever.

It kills the economy, it has socio psychological effects that destroyed families, that destroyed businesses.

And you wanna get people back, but then you have to be able to find a way to control, and mandates don't necessarily work, but the shutdown that we did have with the mask mandates did control things during the time they were in place.

No question about that.

- We're seeing an increased number of hospitalizations and many health experts expect that in a few weeks, we're gonna see a sharp rise in deaths.

How many of these hospitalizations and deaths that we're seeing during this peak from one month ago, how many would you say are unnecessary and could have been avoided?

- Very likely most of them.

Certainly the deaths could very likely have been avoided.

Some of the hospitalizations, especially the ICU hospitalizations of non-vaccinated people could likely have been avoided as well if there were one thing that was done, and that if we had more people who were vaccinated.

Because as you and I have discussed, the vaccine doesn't guarantee you're not gonna get sick.

It simply helps to ensure that you won't get very sick or go to an ICU or die.

My own son who's a strapping, healthy kid was vaccinated.

So, was his wife.

And they had a breakthrough infection, which a lot of my colleagues at university are having.

And he got pretty sick, but had he been unvaccinated with his asthma, he would have probably wound up in the hospital a lot sicker.

- And he's doing well now, I hope.

- Yes, he is.

There's a little lag in terms of his energy, which is common when you have this disease, but he's coming out of it.

- There's a big debate about freedom.

And on the one side, some folks say, "Well, it is my right to say "I don't want to wear a mask.

"And I have the freedom to do that "'cause I live here in the USA."

Another side of that freedom argument is almost always never mentioned.

And that is freedom from contracting the disease.

If you wear the mask as all sorts of public health studies have shown, the diseases is less transmissible.

So, it seems to me, we've got argument over freedom on one side for your health and freedom on the other side to choose to wear a mask or not.

Which freedom has more rights in this country?

Speaking as an attorney.

- Well, there are freedoms to and freedoms from, and there is no freedom that exists independently, that just kind of floats all by itself.

Every single freedom and every single right that has been claimed throughout history has with it a concomitant responsibility.

And it's generally a societal or social responsibility.

So that you can't just say, "I can do whatever I want," without understanding that there may be some effects of what you do.

So, if you go out and you drive and you're drunk, you're placing other people in jeopardy.

If you place your child in the back seat of your car without strapping them into an infancy, you're placing that child in jeopardy.

If you don't wear your seatbelt, you're placing yourself in jeopardy.

And you wouldn't want your children going out on the streets knowing that there were folks who you knew who were drunk and driving.

It just wouldn't be a prudent thing to do.

There's an awful lot we don't know about this disease, but there's a fair amount that we do know that's pretty clear.

The disease is spread through respiratory expression, coughing, sneezing, yelling, singing, talking.

And this particular strain of the disease, Delta, is a thousand times, 1000 times more virulent, more powerful and more contagious.

It's easier to get, and when you get it, you get sicker.

So, in the interest of caution, even if we have political beliefs that say, "You can't make me do something, I think this is a hype."

In the interest of caution, knowing that there's a way that this thing spreads and that it's real.

And you want to protect yourself, your kids, your family, your grandparents, your community, wearing a mask when you're in groups that you don't know have been vaccinated make sense.

We're almost out of this thing, we think, but we're not sure.

So, let's do all that we can.

This is a Smokey, the Bear thing that you and I have talked about, Rob, it's only you can prevent COVID.

It's that's what it gets right down to.

Don't expect the government to help you on this.

They're not gonna save you any more than they're gonna save you from anything else.

This is about personal responsibility, respect for yourself, respect for your others.

And as the Governor has said, just exercise common sense.

Common sense means you know how dangerous this thing is, we're not gonna keep on telling you over and over again.

Just be a good citizen and let's get through this thing together.

- Dr. Jay Wolfson, thanks a lot.

Thanks for coming on the program.

- My pleasure, Rob, and continue, please, to be safe and be well.

- Same with you.

(bright music) - Residents who choose to remain unvaccinated for the coronavirus are having a big impact on Bay Area hospitals.

That's according to Pinellas County Administrator, Barry Burton.

This week, he spoke before the Board of County Commissioners and he joins us now.

And Barry, welcome back to the show.

- Thank you.

- Earlier this week, you told the Pinellas County Commissioners that there was essentially a crisis at Pinellas County hospitals, long waits as people were being offloaded from ambulances.

What's the situation right now at the hospitals in Pinellas?

- Well, inside of a month, we've seen a percent positivity rate go from 2.5% to over 15%.

What that translates to is over 600 cases on a seven day average daily count.

And which is a huge increase in our community.

That is causing a major stress on our entire healthcare system, including in the hospitals, including our EMS responses and stressing the entire system.

- So, are the hospitals not performing the variety of services that they typically will because of this overload of coronavirus cases?

- Well, we saw BayCare just announced that they're suspending some elective surgeries, and elective surgeries are now as a facelift, it's surgeries that need to occur, but they're concerned about having sufficient staff to be able to handle not only the surgeries, but properly staff their emergency rooms and the rest of their health care system.

We've had a significant problem within our emergency rooms where it takes an ambulance that responds to a scene and has someone in their care over an hour to do the transfer at a hospital.

And that normally takes about 15 minutes.

While when that ambulance is out of circulation, well, then it's unable to respond and help do other transports.

That's been putting pressure on fire agencies to have to do transports, but it's really causing a crisis.

- And translate for us.

What does it mean to have a 15% positivity rate there in Pinellas County?

- Well, it means that we're doing more tests than we've ever done because people are going and getting tested because they feel ill. And again, we were at 2%, now we're at 15%, which means it's translates to over 600 cases a day of new cases of coronavirus here in Pinellas County.

- So, it means that it's spreading pretty rapidly at least as of right now.

- Very rapidly, this was the highest we've been throughout the pandemic.

- So, I think there's some people that are never gonna get the vaccine.

For whatever reason, they don't want to get it.

But I do think that there are some people that have just put it off.

What do you say to those people who've put it off?

- Well, we've all have family and friends or others that have differences of opinion.

And I do understand that, I don't understand on the vaccine because it's been so widely tested, but there is differences of opinion.

If you're one that just doesn't take it seriously and have said, "Well, if I get it, "I'm not gonna be that sick."

We encourage you, really do your research, talk to your doctor, but go get the vaccine.

That is the situation.

We're seeing 30, 35 year old people with under no underlying health conditions that are ending up in the emergency room.

This is not the flu.

Take this very, very seriously because unlike for the past year and a half, we have a solution here.

We know that if we get our percent positivity, I mean, our percent vaccinated up in the 80% range that that's gonna help curb this, and we won't have this wide spread of the coronavirus throughout the community.

So, we really are encouraging people, go get your vaccine.

- So, 85% of the nursing home population has been vaccinated.

Has that cured the problem for people who are in nursing homes?

- We do not have a problem within our nursing homes.

And that's exactly right.

Last year, remember we were having to evacuate nursing homes because of COVID spread within our nursing homes.

And so, everybody, the Governor on down, helped us really focus in, do testing.

And we had to actually evacuate nursing homes, but that has been stabilized because of over 85% of the patients and staff being vaccinated.

So, we know that the vaccine works, and that's proof positive that it works.

And so, we're asking the rest of the community to follow suit.

- And we just have 20 seconds.

If somebody hasn't gotten a vaccine yet, and you've convinced them tonight, how do they find out where in Pinellas County to get it?

- On our website, you can go.

We list out all the pharmacies, but most pharmacies have it, many urgent cares and other places have it.

So, please seek it out and you can get it free of charge.

- Barry Burton, thanks a lot.

- Thank you.

(bright music) - Well, joining us now, are State Representative Anna Eskamani, she represents Florida District 47, which includes parts of Orlando, and Deborah Tamargo, the President of the Florida Federation of Republican Women.

It's great to see both of you, thanks for coming on.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- I want to play a sound bite from Governor DeSantis from earlier this week.

And then I want to play a sound bite from Miami Beach Mayor, Dan Gelber, talking about the COVID crisis we've got here in Florida.

Let's roll the tape.

- Why don't you do your job?

Why don't you get this border secure?

And until you do that, I don't wanna hear a blip about COVID from you, thank you.

- [Mayor Gelber] It would be great, by the way, if the Governor used his bully pulpit to encourage people to do stuff.

I don't mean to be so critical of him, I've been complimentary of him during this last year and a half, but obviously in the last six months to a year, he's sort of changed direction, and now it's evident that the change of his direction is having an impact on the health of of our residents.

- So, Deborah, let's start with you.

That was governor DeSantis attacking Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is saying, "If you're not gonna help, "then get out of our way."

How do you think governor DeSantis is doing in dealing with the COVID crisis?

- Well, I think he's doing as well as anyone could do under the circumstances.

There is definitely an uptick, whether it's seasonal or whether it's due to the unfettered immigration.

When you look at the red zones in the map throughout the United States, the zones where we're increasing COVID are the areas that are most prevalent, where they are dropping off the immigrants or where the immigrants are choosing to go.

So, I think that he was very frustrated because if President Biden wants to talk about COVID, then he should have left the border closed.

We were already in a pandemic when he opened the border.

And I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing this spike.

- Anna Eskamani, what would you say back to Deborah?

- I would respectfully disagree as a daughter of immigrants.

I'm also really just personally frustrated by the pivot to immigrants being the cause of the pandemic especially since here in Florida, we don't have a border to countries like Mexico.

And I also think it's important.

Remember that Governor Abbott of Texas and other Republican governors are also facing very similar criticism and his response to the pandemic happening is his state.

And so, red areas could also be attributed to poor leadership or mismanagement, or rather what I think is happening is politicization of the process.

I think Governor DeSantis, he was in Michigan raising money for his reelection campaign, of course, trying to continue to promote himself as he prepares to potentially run for president in 2024.

So, it does seem like he is choosing politics over public health.

And the fact that the State legislature also tie the hands of local governments, having the Governor requested and signed into law has made the local process even more difficult.

So, instead of blaming immigrants, we should be focused on what's happening in front of us.

We have a very highly transmissible Delta variant that is also breaking through folks who are vaccinated right now, and including members of my family that have tested positive.

So, this is very serious.

Our hospital workers are overworked.

We're seeing a continuation of this issue when it comes to our classroom settings, parents are scared about what's gonna happen when kids go back to school.

So, we really need to cut the politics out of it.

Don't pivot the blame and accept responsibility and move forward together.

- So, Deborah, couldn't we take a look at those places where the COVID outbreaks are worse, places like Florida and the Deep South, and say these are the unvaccinated areas.

And that's the problem, that a lot of people are either, politically they're against the vaccines or they're procrastinators, or they don't have access to the vaccines although most people do, but it's the vaccines, right?

That are causing the crisis.

- Well, 60% of the people in Florida are vaccinated.

So, you have that.

Then there is another large percentage that actually had COVID, whether it was asymptomatic or whether they had symptoms.

So, they of course now have antibodies.

And then there was another group that, well, has the antibodies, or they cannot take it for some reason.

So, that puts us about 80%.

Isn't that what they were telling us for the last two years, that was really where we achieve some type of herd immunity.

And we're not blaming the immigrants.

Actually, we're blaming the decision to allow the unvaccinated to come into our country.

And even though we're not a border state, I believe the survey that was done at the borders, asking the immigrants, "Where will you be going?"

And the number one choice was Florida.

Well, quite frankly, everyone wants to come to Florida.

- I think the vaccination rate in Florida is about 50%.

We're not quite at 70 or 80%.

I think you're right though.

Once we get to 80% or 85%, we approach herd immunity.

I wanna ask you about the Governor.

The Governor is saying that he wants to control mask policy so that local school districts or local counties cannot enact their own mask mandate because they'd be violating, they'd be crossing with Tallahassee.

Tallahassee is saying they're gonna take away money from school districts if they impose a mask mandate.

Anna, let me start with you.

What do you think about that?

Tallahassee preempting local power?

- Well, first of all, the vaccination rate for those who are fully vaccinated in Florida is about 50%, based on data available right now.

About 58% for those who have at least one dose.

So, we still have a long way to go in reaching a point of vaccination where we can try to address the spread of this Delta variant.

To the question of our schools.

So, we've heard from Republican parents, Democratic parents, parents of kids with disabilities.

A lawsuit was just filed actually, on behalf of parents of kids with disabilities against the Governor's executive order, because they do want to see not only mass mandates, but the opportunity for a virtual educational option for kids that are immunocompromised and unable to get the vaccine because the vaccine has not been made available to children under the age of 12 at this time.

So, there are some parents of every political persuasion who were frustrated about this.

The Governor's threat to defund is incredibly inappropriate, but it's also potentially against the State Constitution.

Florida State Constitution is very explicit in stating that public schools should be funded in the sense of adequate funding to provide good education to our kids.

And so, there is litigation already in process, but I have a lot of concern, and just even the constitutionality of what he is doing.

And again, it's so much irony here that a party that continuously preaches small government is continuing to practice a very big handed government decision and taking away options for school district to decide what makes sense for their communities.

- And Deborah, should Tallahassee maintain that power and tell local school districts, "You cannot enact a mask mandate."

- Well, there is no mandate against parents sending their kids to school with masks.

So, if parents who know their children, their children's health better than anyone else choose to send them, if they feel safer that they are healthier by having that mask.

Unfortunately, the University of Florida did test masks several months ago during the school year.

And what did they find?

One day's use of mask by children in elementary school, they found feces, urinary bacteria, all sorts of things that actually cause problems to a child's lung, their bloodstream, and so forth.

So, there is no one that can absolutely tell us that masks are a benefit.

And in fact, I find it really an abuse of power for the President, for the Commissioner of Agriculture, to be really telling parents to give their children vaccination.

They don't know the health, and I don't remember their job description enabling them to be the parent of our children.

I think that's our decision and we know what's best and we work with our children's physicians, and that's the way it should be.

And the Governor has not mandated that you cannot send your child to school.

He is giving you that power.

- And this debate is gonna be really intense in the next few weeks.

But then I wish we had more time, but Anna, let me go to you, I wanna ask you about your other big story of the week.

What else should we be paying attention to, that's gone on in the last week that Floridians need to know about?

- Well, there's just so much right now, Rob, and I appreciate this question.

In addition to just the economic consequences of the public health crisis, we're continuing to deal with an eviction crisis, the broken unemployment system, the cost of housing going up and the cost of rent going up.

So, our team has been working over time.

We've provided support to over 45,000 Floridians to their unemployment claims.

And we're still dealing with problems from last year and problems of folks who just applied for unemployment 'cause they lost their jobs.

Also, the environment is an issue on top of mind for me.

We just did a virtual event with scientists focused on the deaths of manatees in the State of Florida, the lack of seagrass.

And of course, you also have red tide.

So, we're continuing to champion all these issues and are really proud to be in a place to serve.

- All right, Deborah, your other big story.

We only have 30 seconds.

- Okay, well, I think we have a public health miss, because I think what we should be hearing from all of our executives, whether it's state or national, is how can you build your child's immune system?

How can you build your own immune system?

How can we look at all of those other causations of death for children; bicycles, suicide, cancer, diabetes, childhood diabetes, which will impact you your entire life?

I think it's a miss.

I think that's where our public health and our leaders need to go.

- Deborah Tamargo, thank you very much.

Representative Anna Eskamani, thank you very much.

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