Amid a fifth straight week of downward-trending COVID-19 positivity rates in Orange County, officials say locals should be prepared to wear masks and adhere to other restrictions at least until the new year — or even longer.
“For the rest of the year? Yes,” said Dr. Raul Pino, the health officer for the Florida Department of Health in Orange County. “Until maybe the spring, or until we have a vaccine.”
Pino, Orange County’s top health official, credited local face-covering requirements with helping to contain a spike in infections that followed Memorial Day.
Orange’s single-day high for positivity rate came June 19, when 18% of tests results received were positive. The highest weekly rate began June 21, with 16.8% of tests coming back positive through June 27.
On June 20, Mayor Jerry Demings’ mask order — requiring face coverings in all public places — went into effect, and cases slowly began declining.
Positivity rates have decreased in each of the four full weeks since, with this week tracking toward the fifth straight week of decline. The week beginning July 19, 9.57% percent of tests in Orange County returned positive.
In the first four days of this week, about 8.2% of tests were positive.
Pino said he believes compliance with the mask mandate has “slowly but surely” brought the county’s positivity rate down.
“Just the mask,” he said. “That’s what we’re seeing.”
But even as daily positivity rates have returned to single digits, Orange still has work to do to reach the World Health Organization’s recommended 5% threshold, or to levels the county saw in May when the overall positivity rate was about 3%. The county’s rate for all testing since the pandemic began is about 11.5%.
Cases spiked in the weeks following Memorial Day, well past levels in March and April that triggered a statewide stay-at-home order. At the time, Pino said his office had traced hundreds of cases to bars, particularly near the University of Central Florida. Young people were largely driving the spread.
A week after the mask order, Florida banned the consumption of alcohol at bars, a decision that could soon be revisited. Halsey Beshears, the secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, is due to meet with bar and brewery owners beginning this weekend to start drawing up a plan to reopen them.
Demings and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said this week it’s “too risky” to open bars now.
“The things that we have in place that are working, we have to keep in place,” Demings said.
Dr. Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, agreed. She said policymakers face difficult decisions on whether businesses like bars should be allowed to reopen, as well as if places like gyms should remain open.
To prevent future large spikes, she also said building up health care and testing capacity — and receiving timely results — will be crucial to ensure that local public health experts can identify outbreaks early, before they become unmanageable.
“I do think it’s possible to prevent additional big spikes,” she said. “Much of the rest of the world has shown us that is possible.”
However, she said children returning to school campuses — where Pino and other health officials have said new infections will occur — could drive future spikes this fall. An order by state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran requiring schools to offer in-person instruction has sparked widespread public health concerns and legal battles.
“They will infect their teachers and staff in the school,” Watson said. “We should be putting every effort into controlling the virus before we bring the kids back.”
Even as cases and hospitalizations are decreasing in Orange, neighboring Osceola County still has daily double-digit positivity rates. For the week beginning July 19, 14% of Osceola tests were positive.
Also, in the past two weeks, Orange County has had its four highest single days of reported deaths related to COVID-19, which is the one metric not improving. Health officials have said deaths tend to lag several weeks behind rises in hospitalizations and cases, so it’s not an unexpected increase.
On Wednesday, 24 deaths were announced, which was the highest single-day total in Orange County. On July 23, 18 deaths were reported. On both July 18 and 22, 14 deaths were reported. The dates don’t reflect when those people actually died, just when their deaths were reported to the Florida Department of Health.
Pino said cases will continue to increase along with social activity, as well as the school year’s return and sports restarting.
“We have to be extremely disciplined,” he said. “How disciplined we are in protecting ourselves and protecting others is going to determine how many we are going to see.”
Demings said sticking with existing guidelines and regulations can help the county diminish future upticks of the coronavirus.
“We can avoid those large spikes we saw before,” Demings said, noting spikes have come after holiday weekends, mass demonstrations and the reopening of bars. “There had been reluctance and resistance. …Now people are wearing masks. Now it’s kind of cool to wear a mask. People are matching masks to their clothing.”
“That human experience has driven compliance.”
rygillespie@orlandosentinel.com, shudak@orlandosentinel.com
