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Sreenivasan: For more about Florida's response, I spoke with Ben Conarck, who covers health care for the Miami Herald earlier today. Ben, where is Florida now in responding to the surge in coronavirus cases?
Ben: I think it's really kind of...we're starting to see the state respond now. A lot of their response earlier was focused on nursing homes, protecting the elderly and, you know, focused on reopening. And we did a project here at the Miami Herald that looked at what we could see in the data as the state was reopening. And what we found was that we didn't really meet these criteria that the C.D.C. Recommended when we reopened. Public health experts were concerned at the time. And then there was a month or so where it was pretty muted, I would say, as far as the case numbers down here in south Florida...we always had a lot. But in other parts of the state, it was pretty quiet until very recently.
Sreenivasan: You're in Miami-Dade county. Fourth of july is coming up. What are the plans?
Ben: Well, the county mayor here just announced that they are going to be closing all the beaches for july 4th weekend. So, everyone found that out late last night. That was after a dramatic increase in the case numbers statewide. We saw nearly 9,000 cases yesterday, which was...dwarfs anything we had seen before that. So, there was a lot of tension that had been building up over the last week. We were seeing these cases jump, and everyone was kind of wondering how bad it was going to get. We still don't know that. You know, the numbers we saw yesterday, the numbers we saw the day before that really reflect infections that started affecting people, you know, a week or more ago. You don't only have the lag for getting a test result, but then you have a lag when the state process that...processes that test result. So, you really have to look at it one week at a time, and the last week was certainly an alarming one.
Sreenivasan: And how easy is it to get the information from the health department or the state? How transparent is the process? How kind of real-time are you accessing all the numbers in Florida?
Ben: Yes, so I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't speak for all journalists, but I think I can speak for most journalists when I say it's been a frustrating experience getting information from the health department and the governor's office. Our newspaper, the Miami Herald, has had to sue the state to get information on nursing homes, and we, you know, we were able to succeed with that. So, it's...it's been an ongoing process. Now, the state does release a lot of data, but that shifts around. It's always a moving target. And...and when the metrics start to look bad, we're told to focus on something else, so...
Sreenivasan: And now, at the same time, Miami-Dade county is seeing an increase in west Nile Virus cases, as well?
Ben: Yeah. That is...you know, that's not uncommon down here, but that is absolutely concerning. I mean, mosquitoes are very omnipresent in Miami. There's been zika down here before. We're seeing Dengue already down in the keys. This is a tropical climate and there are a lot of infectious diseases here. And, you know, that also brings me to hurricanes. We're entering hurricane season, which is always, you know, even in...in a normal year, it's a challenge for Florida. And Florida has gotten really good at preparing and responding to hurricanes, but we've never done it during a pandemic. Or, I guess we have, like a century ago, but it's been a while. So, that's going to be...it's going to be interesting to see. And I think it's a concern for a lot of public health experts that, given how much transmission there is, you know, sheltering people in gyms, in close, confined places could be really bad.
Sreenivasan: All right, Ben conarck from the Miami Herald, thanks so much.
Ben: Thanks for having me.
