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Gov. DeSantis on Florida investigating reports of COVID-19 test errors

2020-07-23 | 🔗
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis provides updates on the coronavirus strategy in the state on ‘Fox & Friends.’
This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
Behind I know youre investigating this. There were some people that said down in Florida. They never got a test, but now theyre listed as testing positive. How did that happen? Well, it didnt happen at any of the sites that the state of Florida is running. Thankfully, theres, a testing industrial complex now theres a lot of money at stake here. People cranking out these tests, theres private companies involved. So what weve asked anyone thats gotten a letter, an e mail, anything a text message you know bring that forward because we want to hold people accountable in theyre engaged in funny business like that. But you do have people, and I you know you hear a lot of things. Obviously, but ive heard this so many times from people that really dont have a reason to make anything up. You know that I think theres something there there. So we absolutely want to get that evidence and go, and there also was a report in Orlando a week or so ago, where you had. Someone in a motorcycle accident died, unfortunately, but that
was categorized as a covid death just because the person had previously tested positive. So you know, I think, the public when they see the fatality figures they want to know who died because they caught covid if youre in a car accident and weve had other instances in just it was no real relationship. Thats been counted, so we want to to see how pervasive that issue as well Brian im. Looking at some of these stats, fifty three of your Icus are zero percent capacity. Last week, last Thursday, you had the all time death rate for Florida at one hundred and fifty six, so you have a lot of cases still there and you have the Icus packed. Well, let me let let me just correct that that you know what theyre doing theyre identifying hospitals, some of which dont is have any icu, because theyre rural hospitals, you have otherses that have a very small number of beds who have people in Icu who arent
covid patients. We had some doctors the other day. Just talk about the record. We have between zero percent of beds have been available, consistent, hi and between zero percent of Icu beds. Statewide have been available is so sometimes youll have a big hospital system where therell be one hospital and thats by design. Inaudible conversations Brian, you just told me, you dont believe its your policies or the behavior of Floridians that are causing these spikes. You believe its seasonal. Why? Well? Because if you look across the sun belt, look im not saying theres, nothing to do with behavior. Obviously that can happen, but regardless of policy youre seeing cases across the sun belt almost in unison is first, it was Arizona, then Florida, Texas, then Southern California, then South Carolina. If so, I think that just the natural progression of this different in the sun belt than it was in the northeast, and so our view has been you know, we knew that it was going to come back at some point. You
know when we went to phase one at the dipping of May. Fortunately, we had six weeks of the lowest numbers weve had throughout the pandemic. Then we started to see it pick up. So weve been ready for that, not only in terms of what weve done with supporting hospitals. Weve established, fifteen covid only nursing homes, so that seniors, who get infected, have a place to go and on and on so weve been prepared for it. I personally thought it probably was going to come back in the fall, but you know dealing with it in the summer is something that were ready for and were handling Steve Governor ive been reading the Palm Beach post during the pandemic, and this morning they say with covid deaths and cases continuing to climb some health experts are cautiously optimistic. That Florida may actually have turned a small corner in the fight against the deadly coronavirus. It sounds like things are starting to flatten out there, which is great, but over the last number of weeks, youve taken a lot of heat because they said you know what he was just trying to reopen things way too fast.
What do you say to those critics? Yeah? Well, a couple things one is. You know we had six weeks of phase one where we had our lowest number the 5 day, Incue to base period. So if that was the cause, you would have seen spikes and then southern Florida, where weve had a significant portion of cases theyre still in phase one, they were closed for basically two months, theyve never had pubses or anything like that open. So I dont think that you know I think people are always trying to do political ploys, but I do think the trends you know are much more positive today than they were. Two weeks ago we peaked on emergency department, visits for Covid, like illness on July, 7th and weve seen a general flattening in the hospital census for Covid. So so those are the types of indicators where you see youre, starting to get stabilization. Our positivity rate is slightly down from where it was which we think will continue and id also just point out. You know when were doing all these tests its a lot different than how people were testing in March and April.
We test everybody most of the people that test positive, that are new cases, are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and dont require any medical attention, so thats just important.
Transcript generated on 2020-07-29.