Two COVID-19-related deaths were reported in Monroe County over the last week, bringing the total to 27 since March when the pandemic emerged in the Keys.
Seventy-six new cases were confirmed to the Florida Health Department in Monroe County over the last weekend. And as a result of local contact tracers’ work, 321 cases in the Keys were recategorized from missing city to the person’s location at the time of the positive test.
Cases out of Key West have approached 1,800, while confirmed COVID-19 cases in Key Largo are nearing 400 and 300 in Marathon. Cases are just over 3,140 as the Keys enters holiday and snowbird seasons.
With the holidays approaching and more people traveling, Bob Eadie, health officer for the Florida Health Department in Monroe County, is placing emphasis on wearing masks, social distancing and avoiding crowds to decrease chances of exposure to COVID-19.
“Is it concerning about Thanksgiving and the travel that’s going on? Yes. And I understand people are really experiencing the pandemic fatigue for all of this, so they want to see their loved ones and they’re traveling,” he said. “But activities like that without taking precautions really open the whole population to a much worse situation than we had the first time around.”
Increased cases have brought increased contact tracing efforts. Eadie said it’s manpower intensive to call several people who may have been in contact with a confirmed case.
New guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control on Nov. 23, however, state that case investigation and contact tracing should not be pursued if more than 14 days have elapsed since the specimen collection. The CDC goes on to urge health departments to prioritize case investigations of people who tested positive for or were diagnosed with COVID-19 in the past six days.
“It’s concentrating on priority cases in a way, and I don’t know how they’re going to define that … just in the sense that with so much of the spread of the COVID virus, traditional contact tracing is just not effective as it could be, having so many cases to follow up,” Eadie said. “You need to figure out how we mitigate what’s going on in (the) community because it’s here, and you can’t prevent it from being here now, so how do you make sure it has the least impact? That’s really where we are right now throughout the country and Monroe County as well.”
Six people were hospitalized at Lower Keys Medical Center with COVID-19 on Nov. 24. Fishermen’s and Mariners hospitals had no patients admitted.
Eadie said while a vaccine is coming, it won’t be widely available to the public until late spring and early summer.
