Face of Nation International : In Naples, a city in southwest Florida where the median age is 66, a hospital abruptly stopped a drive-through testing site this week because they ran out of testing kits.
Doctors in Winter Haven, a city in Central Florida where a quarter of the population is 65 or older, are waiting up to 10 days to get results on coronavirus tests. And in South Miami, in a neighborhood surrounded by retirement homes, the president of a community hospital took out a $380,000 loan on his own house to secure the delivery of 1,000 test kits a week for the next few months.
The Sunshine State has come under fire after its beaches remained jammed with spring breakers last week and Gov. Ron DeSantis has ignored calls to issue a statewide shelter-in-place order. That may contribute to Florida becoming the next hot spot for COVID-19, a chilling possibility considering that the elderly are the most likely to die from the disease and Florida is home to nearly four million people 65 and over, the second-highest number in the U.S. behind California.
Yet hospitals and doctors around the state say they still don’t have nearly enough testing kits and can’t get the ones they have analyzed fast enough, echoing complaints from state health officials across the country. Health officials have completed 27,000 tests so far in Florida, while New York is doing more than 18,000 tests a day. That lack of testing availability means the number of people infected in Florida is likely far higher than the 2,355 coronavirus cases counted by the Florida Department of Health as of Thursday. And it has left hospital administrators scrambling for more testing kits, buying their own laboratory equipment to process tests in house and pleading with people to stay home to slow the virus’ spread. “We need many more specimen collection and testing sites that return results in 24 hours or even same day,” said Kim Savage, a spokeswoman for the Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, which operates a hospital and a dozen urgent care and outpatient care centers in southwest Florida. “Collecting a sample on a Tuesday and then not getting test results back for a week is not effective.”
DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, has issued orders closing down bars and nightclubs, suspending public schools and ordering restaurants to scale down to take-out and delivery only. He ordered anyone flying to Florida from New York, New Jersey or Connecticut to self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival, and his Department of Health has distributed 2,500 testing kits capable of processing 625,000 samples.
But DeSantis has resisted calls from Democrats, physician groups, local leaders and presidential candidate Joe Biden to issue a shelter-in-place order similar to those in New York and California. “While other large states continue to take strong, urgent, and sweeping action to stop the spread of COVID-19, Florida has not,” Biden said in a statement.
That combination has left hospital officials across the state fretting that the tests available so far will not meet the demand. Hospital administrators are now trying to round up testing kits through the private market that has pitted states against states, hospitals against hospitals, and the federal government snatching up what it can. (Source: USA Today News- USA)
