Dr. Charles Lockwood explained to CNN today why Florida isn’t as bad as some are making it out to be with the coronavirus:
Great context from Dr. Charles Lockwood, Senior Vice President of @USFHealth pic.twitter.com/nHLzDemwqV
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) July 13, 2020
As you can see, Governor DeSantis posted this tweet to ensure people saw it. After all, it was on CNN.
In the interview Lockwood first explains that Florida has a lot of surge capacity and in the previous three months hospitals have created a lot more capacity in their emergency ICUs. For example, he notes that Tampa General has 87 ventilators which they haven’t even begun to use.
He also notes that case fatality rate is going down, saying it’s fallen to 1.5% which is one of the lowest in the country. He says part of the reason for that is that most of the people that are being diagnosed now are younger people. The other reason it’s fallen is hospitals are better able to take care of patients now that they have Remsdesivir, Dexamethasone, Convalescent Plasma therapies and he says they do a much better job of ventilating patients.
Lockwood says that another big reason infections are going up is because they are testing at very high rates, saying this past Saturday they tested 143,000 people in one day. He doesn’t deny that the coronavirus is spreading though, but he did note that their test-positive cases, which were at 20% last week, are now down to 11%. He says that number is certainly going in the right direction and this is why he isn’t nearly as pessimistic as some.