The novel coronavirus has claimed the life of its youngest victim in Florida, a 9-year-old Putnam County girl identified as Kimora “Kimmie” Lynum.

Family members said the girl had no underlying health conditions when she suddenly came down with a high fever, according to the New York Post,

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According to a GoFundMe page created in the young girl’s name – which described her as “jovial, fun-loving, and free-spirited” – Kimmie first began to experience stomach pain and developed a 103-degree fever. She was taken to UF Health on July 11, given Tylenol and treated for an infection, but the fundraising site said she was not tested for COVID-19.

Days later, on July 17, Kimmie was playing and “was in great spirits that day,” according to the page.

But later that same day, “she informed her mother she was feeling tired, so she was going to lie down.” A short time later, Kimmie was found unresponsive and CPR efforts made by family members were unsuccessful. A COVID-19 test was performed posthumously and showed she was positive for coronavirus, per the page.

“No one deserves this, words can’t express that she was just amazing. And she didn’t have a chance to live her life but she was always happy, she was resilient and she just was an outgoing young lady,” her cousin Dejeon Cain told local media outlet WCJB-TV.

Kimmie did not have contact with a person positive for the novel coronavirus nor was her case travel-related, according to data from the Florida Department of Health, as cited by the New York Post.

The girl’s family is now speaking out against allowing children to physically return to Florida schools, according to an interview on Florida news outlet First Coast News.

“It hit home, and I think a lot of people out here are not understanding that we have to take this thing seriously,” family spokesperson Dejeon Cain told the media outlet, fearing more children could die from COVID-19.

“We cannot send our kids to school in the midst of a pandemic and use them as a pawn. We’ve lost compassion in our state and local governments,” Cain added.

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“Families need to look at that and say ‘OK, how can I minimize the risk?” Dr. Jason Littleton told local outlet FOX 35-TV in Orlando. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a set of guidelines on how to reopen schools safely.)

This is not the only tragedy to strike the family this year. According to multiple media outlets, Kimmie’s father, Theophilus Lynum, was shot and killed in April in Alachua County, Fla. Police are still investigating his death and no arrests have been made yet.

The GoFundMe page in Kimmie’s name was created to help cover funeral costs and also set up a scholarship in her name.

The girl is the fifth minor to die from COVID-19 in the state, according to the New York Post.

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Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – An error by the Florida Department of Health produced a COVID-19 positivity rate for children of nearly one-third, a stunning figure that played into the debate over whether schools should reopen.

A week after issuing that statistic, the department took it back without explanation. The next weekly report on children and COVID-19 showed the rate had plunged to 13.4%.

The department blamed a “computer programming error” for the mistake, in response to questions from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Experts said the change and the failure to explain it to the public calls into question the state’s data at a time when accurate and trustworthy information is crucial to a society grappling with an unprecedented health crisis.

“It’s unacceptable to publish information that changes so dramatically that it warrants explanation, and then to not provide any explanation,” said Jason Salemi, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida College of Public Health in Tampa. “I’m trying to get an understanding of why the number changed so much, what underlies it – and can we trust this new number.”

The unexplained revision of the child positivity rate follows months of complaints and legal fights over what many see as a lack of transparency in the COVID-19 information provided by the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In the early days of the pandemic, before most people had any idea that coronavirus was spreading in Florida, the state declined to disclose the presence of suspected cases, citing privacy concerns. The state then refused to make public the number of deaths at individual nursing homes, agreeing to do so only under legal pressure from news organizations. And after producing a nationally-praised website on COVID-19, the state Department of Health fired the site’s manager, who has since filed a whistleblower complaint saying she had been punished for refusing to falsify data.

“Each time journalists want more, it’s a struggle to get it,” said Pamela Marsh, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida nonprofit group that advocates open government. “In the very early days, the state wouldn’t give the names of nursing homes. Then they gave the names, then the press asked for numbers within the nursing homes. More recently, it took two or three weeks for the state to provide numbers on hospitalizations.”

This information is vital, she said, as Floridians trying to make real-world choices on protecting themselves and their families at a time of unprecedented uncertainty.

“All these decisions that we have to make – sending our kids to school, whether we shop for one week or two weeks – all these decisions that can’t be made in a vacuum or based on neighborhood rumor,” she said. “We have to have good data. When you have family members in nursing homes and you’re trying to make decisions about their care, there’s so many decisions that require good data because if you make a mistake it’s life-altering.”

The 31.1% positivity rate for children was provided in the health department’s July 10 pediatric report, a weekly summary posted on the state health department’s COVID-19 website. The new report, dated July 17, showed the sudden decline in the rate. The new report also showed what appeared to be a massive increase in testing. The number of children tested rose from 54,022 in the earlier report to 173,520 in the later one.

The state blamed the erroneous children’s statistic on a failure to include thousands of negative test results, which artificially inflated the positivity rate.

“Initially, there was an error in the pediatric reports in which a certain number of negative test results were not included,” the department said in an email. “That error has since been corrected and the current pediatric report available on FloridaHealthCOVID19.gov reflects the most up-to-date data available regarding pediatric COVID-19 cases.”

“It was a computer programming error specifically linked to the production of the pediatric data report. As a result, a subset of negative pediatric test results were unintentionally excluded from the pediatric report.”

Even health officials seemed in the dark about the children’s positivity rate. Dr. Alina Alonso, director of the state health department’s Palm Beach County office, on July 14 told county commissioners that the county’s infection rate for children had risen to an alarming level.

“It has gone up to 33.6%,” she said. “That literally means that a third of the age under 18 that we test are positive. And while many of these, especially younger children, are asymptomatic, when you take x-rays of their lungs they are seeing that there is damage to the lungs in these asymptomatic children.”

But a few days later, a report issued by the department Alonso works for revoked that shocking figure. The new report showed the Palm Beach County rate had dropped to 14.1% – still high, but dramatically less than half the previous week’s rate. Accompanying the decrease was an apparent increase in Palm Beach County child test results of more than 200%, from 4,063 to 12,399, over a single week.

Experts say there’s a “black box” quality to many basic state statistics, which are presented without the underlying data that could allow experts and the public to verify and understand them.

Florida had been an early leader among states in presenting easy-to-read daily COVID-19 updates, but has fallen behind, said Olivier Lacan, a volunteer for the COVID Tracking Project, which tracks data across the country. He said the state fails to report vital statistics, such as detailed racial breakdowns of cases and the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units or on ventilators, and fails to make public the raw data that goes into producing the final numbers.

“Florida was surprisingly good at the outset,” he said. “I think they’re completely overrun. I think they’re underfunded, understaffed, inexperienced for this kind of stuff. This is the sense that I get from them. I don’t think DOH was ready for a pandemic. It seems very haphazard, and now they’re clammed up.”

The state positivity rate presented by the department, for example, is impossible to double check because the status of repeat testing of the same person is unclear. The positivity rate also mashes together the results of two types of tests, one of which produces a large number of false negatives, which would have the effect of skewing the positivity rate downward.

Salemi, the University of South Florida professor, said he found the state’s explanation of a programming error for the high child rate to be insufficient.

“What programming error? Why did it only happen for the pediatric report? Why not other age groups?” he asked. “I don’t want to speculate it’s anything more than an honest error, but I just wish they would provide full details to re-instill trust in us all. People are accepting of honest errors if explained and rectified. They are not when details about data issues lack transparency.”

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The largest teachers’ union in Florida filed a lawsuit Monday against Gov. Ron DeSantis over his administration’s push to fully reopen all public schools next month — even as coronavirus cases in the state are spiking.

The Florida Education Association (FEA) accused DeSantis and other state officials of violating a state constitutional mandate to keep public schools “safe and secure.” The union asked a state court in Miami to halt the governor’s reopening edict, according to a copy of the suit obtained by NBC News.

The lawsuit, filed in circuit court, names several defendants: DeSantis, Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, the Florida Department of Education and the Florida State Board of Education. The legal filing is sure to escalate a nationwide political debate over school reopenings amid the pandemic.

“Gov. DeSantis needs a reality check, and we are attempting to provide one,” FEA President Fedrick Ingram said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “The governor needs to accept the reality of the situation here in Florida, where the virus is surging out of control.”

Florida is grappling with a significant surge in coronavirus cases, reporting upwards of 10,000 new cases on Monday alone. DeSantis was heckled by protesters during a news conference in Orlando on Monday afternoon, with some demonstrators shouting, “Shame on you!”

DeSantis, a first-term Republican, did not immediately respond to a request for comment through his press office.

Corcoran issued an emergency order earlier this month in which he said schools were “not just the site of academic learning” but also key places for “nutrition, socialization, counseling and extracurricular activities.” He said reopening schools was crucial in terms of “Florida hitting its full economic stride.”

The order, which applies to the fall academic semester, requires schools to open at least five days a week for all students, subject to guidance from public health officials. It came after DeSantis recommended all Florida schools reopen at full capacity. He argued that if they remained closed, parents would not be able to return to work.

Here’s an overview of other coronavirus-related developments making headlines Monday:

• The coronavirus vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca is safe and shows signs of inducing an immune response, according to early clinical trial results published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet. NBC News’ Erika Edwards, Sara G. Miller and Keir Simmons have more details here.
• President Donald Trump and Republican congressional leaders met on Monday to map out their priorities for another round of federal coronavirus aid, which will decide the future of increased unemployment payments and aid to schools reopening in the fall. NBC News’ Rebecca Shabad, Kasie Hunt and Julie Tsirkin covered the meeting.
• In other Washington news, Trump said Monday he will resume doing regular coronavirus briefings as the White House struggles to settle on a message — and a role for him amid a surge in cases across the country, NBC News’ Shannon Pettypiece reports.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday traveled to hard-hit Georgia. New York has sent personal protective equipment, test kits and contract tracers to new hot spots across the South, where several states are seeing an alarming surge of the virus. NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez spoke with Cuomo during his travels. You can watch the full interview on the “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt” tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT.
• The release of Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” a mind-bending espionage thriller, has been postponed indefinitely after being delayed twice, according to news reports. The film was seen as a bellwether for Hollywood’s attempts to revive theatrical moviegoing and begin a financial rebound.

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Mickey, Minnie and Goofy are going back to work Saturday as Disney World is pushing ahead with plans to reopen even as Florida continue to rack up a near-record number of new coronavirus cases.

The 11,433 new COVID-19 cases reported Friday was the state’s biggest daily increase since July 3, when 11,458 cases were recorded. Additionally, the state health department reported 435 more hospitalizations — the state’s largest single-day increase.

Florida also reported 93 additional deaths Friday, bringing the statewide COVID-19 death toll above 4,100.

Dr. Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, told Variety the reopening of Disney World is a “terrible idea.”

“There are several hospitals that are running out of beds in Florida, with health workers warning that there are not going to be enough ventilators and enough rooms, and cases in the state are breaking new records daily,” said Rimoin. “Moving forward with reopening, I think, is inviting disaster.”

Disney furloughed 100,000 theme park and hotel workers, including cast members who play the beloved Walt Disney characters in Florida and elsewhere, back in April.

The move to allow people to return to the Magic Kingdom comes as the nationwide daily death toll from COVID-19 appears to be on the rise again, grim new NBC News numbers showed Friday.

There were 1,021 new deaths reported across the country on Thursday, the most since June 30, according to the figures.

Florida, with 120, was one of the five states accounting for more than half of Thursday’s reported fatalities, an NBC News analysis revealed.

The other states reporting the most COVID-19 deaths were New Jersey with 142, California with 131, Texas with 111, and Arizona with 75. Also, 19 states have seen their two-week death totals increase by more than 20 percent in the last two weeks.

Meanwhile, the U.S. appears to have set another unwanted record with more than 63,200 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, Johns Hopkins University is reporting.

That dismal new figure is higher than 56,667 new cases that NBC News, which has been compiling its own list of new cases and deaths since the pandemic started, tallied Friday.

But all that awful arithmetic was yet another reminder that the plague that President Donald Trump just a week ago predicted would “just disappear” continues to spread fast, especially in states like Texas, Florida and Arizona which reopened early and are now paying a steep price.

“We are living in the perfect storm,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Financial Times interview published Friday.

“I think we have to realise that some states jumped ahead of themselves,” Fauci said. “Other states did it correctly. But the citizenry didn’t listen to the guidelines and they decided they were going to stay in bars and go to congregations of crowds and celebrations.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot echoed Fauci in an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.

“People seem to have forgotten that COVID is very much part of our present,” Lightfoot said.

In other developments:

• In Arizona, where 2,038 more deaths and 112,671 new cases were reported Thursday, the morgue in Phoenix was filling up with bodies so fast officials are trucking in refrigerated trailers to store more corpses. “So the Abrazo Health Care system has run out of morgue beds and the county is getting refrigerated trucks,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said on MSNBC.

• In an all-too-rare rare show of bipartisanship, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, praised Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, for leading by example and wearing a mask during pubic appearances. “He is talking about wearing a mask, and for that, I’m really grateful,” Beshear said on MSNBC. “He’s doing it in public, and for that, I’m really grateful. It shows that wearing a mask isn’t political at all.” Beshear’s mask-wearing mandate for Kentucky goes into effect on Friday evening. Mask-wearing has become deeply politicized with many Trump supporters following his example and refusing to wear them in public.

• In Alabama, another state that has seen a rapid rise on cases, the leader of the state senate was catching flack for saying that it would be a good thing if more people caught COVID-19. “In fact, quite honestly, I want to see more people because we start reaching an immunity if more people have it and get through it,” Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh, a Republican, said.

Herd immunity has been championed by a number of Republican politicians who argue that coronavirus lockdowns have been too strict. But most scientists say there is little evidence that it works. And Sweden, a nation of 10 million where this has been the strategy, has experienced 5,500 deaths. Sweden now has 55 cases per 100,000 people compared to the U.S., which has 41 per 100,000 people, according to an NBC News calculation.

Meanwhile, Texas was bracing for more pain The Lone Star state has already racked-up 239,657 cases and a death toll of 3,102, according to NBC News’ numbers from Thursday.

“I gotta tell you, I think the numbers are going to look worse as we go into next week,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told KRIV-TV in Houston on Thursday.

Abbott, a Republican and Trump ally, has taken flak for reopening Texas for business as the number of coronavirus cases started to climb and for not insisting earlier that local authorities follow federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention safety recommendations like wearing masks while in public places.

Texas needs to reimpose another stay-at-home, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat whose district includes hard-hit Houston, said Friday.

“We opened a government here in Texas, too quickly,” Lee told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “It was May 1st. We had not followed the CDC guidelines. Certainly we’re now working as a team. I appreciate what the state government is trying to do, Andrea, but we have 10,000 people in the hospital beds this week. We have people dying every day.”

Among the new Texas cases are two stand-up comedians, Bryan Callen and Brendan Schaub, who tested positive for COVID-19 after performing last month in a San Antonio club.

“We should probably let everybody know that Brendan and I did everything wrong in Texas,” Callen said on their podcast, The Fighter and the Kid. “We practiced no social distancing, got up in front of 350 people as they were laughing at us and shouting at us, and then when we got off stage — didn’t change mics.”

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MIAMI (AP) — Fighting a surge in coronavirus cases in the spring, Florida appeared to be “flattening the curve” as theme parks shuttered, sugar sand beaches closed and residents heeded orders to stay home. Now, it’s almost as if that never happened.

Bars, restaurants and gyms began reopening in May — critics said it was too soon — and weeks later, the Sunshine State became one of the country’s virus hot spots, experiencing an alarming surge in cases. On Thursday, officials reported 120 deaths in one day, the highest number since the previous record of 113 in early May.

“We thought maybe we could keep this thing under wraps. And that worked for a little bit of time,” Dr. Jason Wilson, an E.R. physician at Tampa General Hospital, said during a conversation with Tampa Mayor Jane Castor that was livestreamed Wednesday on Facebook. “But eventually … it caught up to us.”

From Miami to Jacksonville and Tampa, hospitals in June and July have seen their numbers of coronavirus patients triple, with new patients outpacing those being discharged. A record 435 newly hospitalized patients were reported Friday to have tested positive for the virus, though they include people seeking hospital care for other reasons and are not all symptomatic.

More than 45% of intensive care units in Florida hospitals were at capacity or had fewer than 10% of their beds available as of Friday, the state Agency for Health Care Administration reported on its website.

Hospital networks are scrambling to hire more health care workers to expand their COVID units. Last week, hospitals in several cities announced they would again halt or reduce nonemergency procedures to free up space.

Wilson and other health experts believe the spike was sparked in large part by young people who weren’t experiencing symptoms and were more likely to take fewer precautions while gathering at reopened bars and crowded beaches.

“We saw the floodgates open really for young people having what we call asymptomatic or presymptomatic spread,” he said. “Three weeks later, we are starting to see everyone else starting to get the virus as well.”

The state’s predicament echoes that of other current hot spots. Texas, which is marking its deadliest week of the pandemic, on Thursday reported a record daily death toll of more than 100, a new high for hospitalizations for the 10th consecutive day, and a nearly 16% positive test rate, its highest yet. In Arizona, hospitals were at nearly 90% capacity, with a record 3,437 patients hospitalized as of Wednesday, and a record number of those, 575, on ventilators, health officials said. Earlier in the week, a record high number of 871 patients filled ICU beds.

In Miami-Dade, Florida’s worst-hit county, a few of the smaller hospitals have run out of ICU beds completely, though countywide there were still about 14% available as of Friday, the state health agency reported. Even hospitals with some of the biggest ICUs in the state are stretched: Tampa General currently has 70 patients who are infected, half of whom are in ICU beds, Wilson said.

Chad Neilsen, the infection prevention director for UF Health Jacksonville hospital, anticipates the hospital will run out of rapid test kits in about two weeks or maybe sooner because manufacturers can’t keep up with demand. He said the hospital instead will have to rely on commercial labs, which can take several days to issue results. Quest, a company that operates many such labs, said this week that it is potentially facing an even longer turnaround because of high demand.

Slower test results have a domino effect because a hospital has to assume that every patient with flu-like symptoms has COVID-19, meaning it will burn through its protective equipment and other gear much more quickly.

“For a hospital, that’s a big problem,” Neilsen said. “We have patients that need surgery that we want to test. We have mothers about to give birth that we want to test.”

The rise in hospitalizations comes as physicians and nurses have been working around the clock for months, and during the summer, when facilities are typically low staffed. Gov. Ron DeSantis just deployed 200 nurses to fill staffing shortages in Miami and Tampa, and has pledged to send hundreds more.

“We’re just overwhelmed with patients. … Right now, it’s like all hands on deck,” said Esther Segura, a nurse at Miami’s Jackson South Medical Center, who said she and her colleagues are weary after four months working in the pandemic. “Now we’re just spiking all the way. Every day the numbers keep surging.”

Physicians and hospital officials are also concerned about how long it takes to discharge patients.

Yolanda Villalobos of Homestead, Florida, said her husband, Julio Alejandro Berrios, was on a ventilator for weeks at one of the first intensive care units to fill up in the Miami-Dade area. The 37-year-old, 300-pound (136-kilogram) man was feverish, delusional and screaming in pain when Villalobos carried him out of their bedroom and delivered him into the hands of paramedics.

“I thought he would be there three days or a week at the most,” Yolanda Villalobos said.

In both Jacksonville and Miami, doctors expressed worries about a noticeable uptick in the number of patients on ventilators. The Florida Hospital Association’s interim president, Crystal Stickle, said providers are all trying to get their hands on remdesivir, which has been shown in a clinical trial to help with the disease.

Stickle said initially the governor and federal lawmakers helped obtain quantities of the drug that the state health department then distributed to hospitals. But beginning next week, she said, the drug will begin shipping directly to the hospitals.

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Florida health officials on Sunday announced more than 200,000 people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus since the pandemic began.

The latest state statistics showed an additional 10,000 confirmed cases. The highest number of confirmed cases in a single day came Saturday when more than 11,400 cases were reported.

As of Sunday, some 3,731 people have died. Of all cases, around 43 percent were in just three counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach.

A health-care worker at a drive-through coronavirus testing site Sunday in Miami Gardens, Fla. 
(AP)

During a Sunday appearance on ABC News’ “This Week,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who said he had the virus back in March, called the high numbers “extremely worrisome.”

“It’s clear that the growth is exponential at this point,” he added. “Our county closed down the beaches for the July Fourth weekend in the hopes that all these rules will have an impact – a positive impact. It takes a little bit of time to find out, exactly, but we’re obviously very closely monitoring hospitalizations and we’re very, very closely monitoring the death rate, which our lagging indicators, that give us the impression that we have to take much stricter – much stricter measurements – measures.”

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said Sunday on CBS News’ Face the Nation that people in his county “let their guard down around late May, early June.”

“The virus is not harmless. No, absolutely not,” he continued. “If it were harmless, I wouldn’t be taking the steps that we’re taking here in Miami-Dade.”

Gimenez, who closed the beaches this holiday weekend, said young people have been fueling the increase in cases in his county.

“We saw a rapid rise in young people in getting – being positive to COVID-19 around mid-June. And, I think that that had a lot to do with probably socializing, young kids going to parties, maybe graduation parties at homes, because it’s – it’s been pretty locked down here for some time.”

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Florida’s death count was the ninth highest in the country overall and the 27th highest per capita at 17.4 deaths per 100,000 people.

There were 451.9 new reported cases per 100,000 people in Florida over the past two weeks, which ranked second in the country for new cases per capita.

Florida’s grim milestone came as other states in the nation – particularly Arizona, Texas, and California – have been experiencing a resurgence of coronavirus cases, forcing some governors to roll back their re-opening plans.

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But, last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said his state will not reimpose sweeping shutdowns amid rising coronavirus infections, saying going back to lockdowns would cripple the economy without saving lives.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Florida shattered its single-day record for new coronavirus cases, nearly tying New York state’s peak daily count set in April.

Florida on Saturday reported 11,458 new cases of the virus, which breaks its previous records and approaches New York’s highest daily tally of 11,571 in April, according to NBC Miami and the New York State Department of Health.

New York’s peak was the highest one-day tally in the nation so far, according to Marketwatch.

In Florida, nearly all of the new cases, 11,445, were among state residents.

The state is among 11 where numbers have spiked, at least doubling over the past two weeks. The other states, mostly in the South and West, are: Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, South Carolina and Texas, according to an NBC News analysis.

The U.S. as a whole meanwhile reported 53,213 new cases, its second day in a row with a tally exceeding 50,000, according to the World Health Organization. The country has over 2.7 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 128,481 deaths, the WHO reports.

In Florida, Miami-Dade County’s efforts to slow the spread of the virus include a new curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. that began Friday night. County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez also said he was rolling back the reopening of entertainment venues, including movie theaters, bowling alleys and casinos under county control. The county previously closed its beaches for the Independence Day holiday weekend.

The state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is meanwhile encouraging people in the state to wear face coverings but has not made it a requirement.

DeSantis’s communications director, Helen Aguirre Ferre, said in an email that the growth in cases in the state was in part because Florida has also hit a new record in the number of tests performed: 85,086. The percentage of those receiving positive results remained constant at 14 percent, she said.

The governor’s office noted that most Floridians already live under a mask mandate, as populous counties like Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Duval and Hillsborough counties have already adopted such requirements.

“Governor DeSantis continues to stress the importance of personal responsibility in helping defeat COVID,” Ferre said in the email. “Florida has launched public service announcements, in both English and Spanish, emphasizing the importance of wearing a facial covering and avoiding the ‘3 c’s’: crowded spaces, closed spaces, and close-contact spaces.”

A group of 10 Democratic lawmakers urged DeSantis on Friday to mandate mask-wearing for all of Florida, according to NBC Miami.

“In watching the devastation that COVID-19 is causing in our communities, we strongly recommend that the State of Florida implement a mandatory use of face covering over the nose and mouth while in a business or other building open to the public, as well as outdoor public spaces, whenever social distancing is not possible,” the lawmakers wrote to the governor, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

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