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Florida now has more than 12,000 hospital patients with coronavirus – the highest number since the start of the pandemic. Schools are set to open in the state, and the governor says new COVID requirements are out of the question.
Inside the Memorial Health System in Broward County, intensive care beds are filling fast again, CBS News’s Manuel Bojorquez reports.
“It has grown 400% in the past six weeks,” said Aurelio Fernandez, president and CEO of Memorial, which recently added 266 beds to meet demand.
Hospitals are also facing staff shortages. According to the Florida Hospital Association, 60% of hospitals in the state could experience a critical staff shortage within the next week.
President Biden called out hot spot governors this week, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for failing to implement the restrictions, including mask warrants in schools.
“If you’re not going to help, at least keep people from trying to do the right thing,” Biden said Tuesday.
DeSantis signed an executive order late last week prohibiting school districts from forcing students to mask themselves, despite CDC guidelines saying masks should be required of everyone in K-12 schools. He signed it to “protect the freedom of parents to choose” whether their children wear masks in schools.
DeSantis said of the president on Wednesday: “He thinks it should be a government decision, well, I can tell you in Florida, the parents will be solely responsible for that decision.”
The governor argued at a press conference in Panama that Mr. Biden’s immigration policies are responsible for the COVID wave, claiming, without any evidence, that undocumented immigrants are at the root of the spread of the virus.
“Why don’t you secure this border, and until you do, I don’t want to hear about COVID from you,” DeSantis said of the president.
Florida’s rise in COVID is due to the highly contagious delta variant and permissive behavior, said Dr. David Agus, CBS News medical collaborator.
“With low vaccination rates and… coming out without masks and in large groups, you’re going to have a significant spread of the virus, period,” he said.
The spike in infections in the state includes children. 135 children under the age of 18 in Florida were hospitalized with COVID on Wednesday, the highest on record.
John Moreno Escobar, who is running for Broward County School Board and whose son, Luca, will be starting first grade this year, said: “The minimum we can do to protect everyone who has decided to do so. to vaccinate or not is to put on our mask, even if we are vaccinated. “
He thinks it’s up to parents to convince those who hesitate.
“We protect others by putting on the mask,” he said. “Putting on a mask is protecting someone else’s life, and life is sacred and we should protect everything as a community.”
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