this is Facing South Florida
with Jim DeFede.
Good morning, and welcome
to Facing South Florida.
Later in the show we will
look at what ICE is doing,
and what it should be
doing during this pandemic.
You may not think that what
happens in detention centers
like Krome, have a
very real impact on you.
You may not care about
those folks being detained,
but trust me, when I
tell you, it does matter.
But first, our nursing homes
and assisted living facilities.
Nearly 100 nursing home
residents have died in Dade,
Broward, and Palm Beach
counties from COVID-19.
These facilities
continue to be at risk,
so I spoke to Jared Moskowitz,
the State's Emergency Management
Director, about a plan to go
into some nursing homes and
conduct much needed testing.
We're going to be doing
upwards of 500 tests per day,
continuing to find different
facilities and going in and
swabbing people
and testing them.
We'll continue to try
and increase that again,
as we find
additional capacity to do so,
but this is extremely important.
There are 2,100 nursing
facilities around the country
right now, that
have COVID cases.
I saw one in
particular in Virginia,
a very sad story, 42 people
have died at one facility,
and 126 of the 162 people
that live there are positive,
and here in the
state of Florida,
obviously, we are ground zero,
if you will for nursing homes
and ALF, and we've got a
significant amount of those,
of the ones that
exist around the country,
which is why we were one of
the first states to close these
facilities, first limit these
facilities to visitors and then
close them to visitors, and
unfortunately some of this stuff
came in via staff, even
though we had some of the most
stringent screening
around the country.
And so we've been extremely
vigilant with our nursing homes.
I mean I can tell
you, so you know,
we've went and visited 3,874
long-term care facilities,
and we've had teams respond
to 93 strike teams go into
93 facilities when
there have been issues.
To give you some
additional statistics,
we've sent, based on
contracts that DM acquired,
153 nurses to these
facilities to help out,
and we've done a number
of ambulance transfers,
of 199 ambulances in use.
Now PPE is extremely
important in these facilities,
extremely important, and so if
we want to talk about being able
to stop the spread, this is
really a first in DEM and we're
sending stuff to
private companies.
I can tell you after hurricanes
the government doesn't just send
stuff to private companies.
This is really the first time.
Private hospitals,
private nursing homes,
private ALF, so what we've sent
to the private long-term care
facilities is we've sent
2.8 million masks to these
facilities, and we've send
362,000 face shields,
160,000 gowns, and
428,000 gloves,
and we'll continue
to fill mission requests as they
come in, and even
without mission requests,
we're going to continue to try
to push stuff directly to these
facilities, and push stuff
to the county staging areas,
so that stuff can be locally
there in the event that there's
an exigent need.
How many long-term
care facilities,
whether you define
it as a nursing home,
an ALF, how many of those
facilities in the state of
Florida have tested,
have had individuals,
either employees or residents,
test positive for COVID-19?
Yeah, I don't know the
number right off hand,
of how many
facilities have had it,
but the answer is,
Jim, it's been bunch, okay.
Let's be honest.
There's a lot of facilities that
have had either a nursing home
patient, someone that
lives there that's positive,
or a staff member
that's positive,
and we should also be honest.
That trend is going
to continue, okay.
This is something that is
happening nationally and is a
trend that is going to continue,
even though these facilities are
locked down, even though these
facilities have no visitors,
even though their
staff is being screened,
even though the
vendors are being screened.
We know that there are people
who are a-symptomatic and as
a result can pass
all the screenings,
and so, you know even
with PPE sometimes there
are things that happen.
There is no such thing as
these things are airtight,
and so we've been sending the
PPE down to the front lines,
and we've been sending
that to the nursing homes.
2.8 million masks have
gone to these facilities,
and we'll continue to obviously
look at major requests that come
in and then push stuff
down to the county level,
and we're going to try to
increase our sentinel program,
which is basically what
we're doing with the guard,
which is to go into these
facilities and test people.
That data is
extremely important,
because what you do is you want
to find out even before there's
an issue that we read
about in the newspaper,
that we want to find out is,
what is the problem in these
nursing homes.
We're going in
the nursing homes,
by the way that don't
have a positive case.
We're going into other nursing
homes to find out what is the
situation in that nursing
home, are there people that are
positive there, and if they
are, A: are they asymptomatic,
and that's why no
one checked on them,
or B: what percentage of that
population may be positive
but asymptomatic.
I mean these are important
things to understand of what's
going on in these facilities.
JIM: And you talked
about testing and being more
aggressive in going into some
of these facilities and doing
testing, and you
have the ability to,
I think the number you
used was it 500 a day,
or 500 a week?
JARED: 500 a day.
JIM: Is 500 an
adequate number in your mind?
Is 500 adequate?
No, I mean, no, everyone would
like to test as many people as
we possibly, humanly can, right?
Right now that's limited by
the national infrastructure,
and look we just launched
this program at 500 a day.
Does that mean that two weeks
from now we'll be a 500 a day?
No, I fully expect it that the
program is going to continue to
increase, but at the same time,
does that mean that everybody
who either works or
lives in a nursing home,
every single solidarity person
is going to get tested by the
time this program's done?
No, that doesn't mean
that that's the case.
What we're going to do is we're
going to test a significant
amount of people and then
the data will tell us what our
problems look like and
where our issues are.
And so, Jim, not like
every person in every
state is being tested.
It's the same thing, right?
We are focusing on people
who are either symptomatic,
or have been around
someone with COVID-19,
and so that's where the program
is starting in these nursing
homes and these ALFs, but
then we're going to continue to
expand and test
people who show symptoms,
to give us an idea of what is
going on in these nursing homes.
And by the way, I'm not aware
that any other state is doing
the sort of testing
that we're doing,
where we're literally going in
with the national guard in these
facilities and swabbing
people, so that we can
get this vital information.
I mean this is
about saving lives, right?
This is about
identifying the problem,
and that's why we pushed
down all this life saving PPE
to the front lines.
I mean we are doing and bringing
these resources to the table and
being aggressive,
but as we all know,
because it's been reported every
single hour of every single day
for the last month, as everybody
sits home and hears the news
right, is that there's
limitations in PPE around the
country, and
limitations in testing capacity.
When we come back,
we look inside the ICE