3 Flagler Residents Die of Covid, Raising Local Toll to 26; Health Department Expecting Rapid Tests Soon

The rapid covid test the Flagler Health Department is expecting, from Abbott, looks like a credit card that's run through a small machine, providing results in minutes. (Abbott) — The rapid covid test the Flagler Health Department is expecting, from Abbott, looks like a credit card that’s run through a small machine, providing results in minutes. (Abbott)

Three more Flagler County residents have died of covid-19 , the Flagler Health Department’s Bob Snyder said today, bringing the county’s total covid death toll to at least 26, not including two or three people who died in Flagler but were not local residents.

The latest victims of the disease were a 67-year-old white man who died on Sept. 26, a 77-year-old white woman who died on the 28th, and a 73-year-old white man who died today. None of the three deaths are connected to the superspreader events that took place earlier this month at the Social Club of Palm Coast, to which at least two deaths have been attributed.

“We have 16 in the hospital right now with covid-like symptoms or illness,” Snyder said. That’s up one since Friday, though other indicators at the hospital are trending down, with fewer people reporting to the emergency room with covid-like symptoms in the past two weeks, after a weekly peak of above 60 on Sept. 6. The number is down by about half.

Positive cases in Flagler continue to follow an “up and down” pattern, Snyder said, depending on the day, with 80 confirmed cases last week (through reporting on Saturday) and 29 more since, through reporting today, with a positivity rate, according to the local department, of 5 percent. (The positivity rate for the last 11 days is double that when calculated based only on the state’s tally of RT-PCR tests: 109 positive cases against 1,074 tests, according to state figures.)

Cases have been falling in schools and in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which had been worrisome sites of clusters earlier this month. “I checked with our school health coordinator today,” Snyder said. “The number of cases emanating from the school district are remaining low compared to the first two to three weeks of school. So that is good news. Things seem to have settled down in our long-term care facilities in terms of residents who are dealing with Covid. I checked this morning and we had zero residents in any of our facilities with covid at the moment, which is excellent news. Big change.”

“Our last two positive results for our residents was reported to us on 09/10,” Kiran Kaur, the Tuscan Gardens group’s spokesperson, wrote FlaglerLive on Sept. 24. “As of today, not only we past 14 day shelter-in-suite period, I am happy to report we are Covid-free both for our residents and associates.

The next milestone for the Flagler Health Department is getting hold of the county’s share of a batch of rapid tests.

Florida will receive 400,000 rapid-test kits a week that can be used to detect Covid-19 infections at schools, senior centers and long-term care facilities, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday. The Florida Division of Emergency Management will take the lead in distributing the test kits, which are coming from the federal government, said division Diretor Jared Moskowitz.

“We will do our part to make sure that this gets out as fast as possible,” said Moskowitz, whose agency has been in charge of distributing personal protective equipment, such as gowns, face shields, gloves and masks to long-term care facilities. The federal government requires that the tests be performed in settings that operate under what is known as a CLIA Certificate of Waiver, which, DeSantis said, requires that the tests be conducted by nurses. But DeSantis said the state will request a waiver of that requirement, saying it isn’t a good use of nurses’ time.

“We’re going to work really hard on this. This is significant. I’ve been frustrated with how the testing has gone, because it seems anytime we did something, then there would be something that happened. Maybe the labs are backed up. Maybe this, maybe that,” DeSantis said. “This is probably as happy as I’ve been about testing in an awful long time.”

The rapid test is one of two diagnostic tests for Covid-19 that indicate whether a person has an active coronavirus infection. Molecular tests, such as RT-PCR tests, detect the virus’ genetic material, but can take from a day to a week to get the results. Antigen tests detect specific proteins on the surface of the virus and come back within 15 minutes. However, antigen tests can have false negatives, and results may need to be confirmed with molecular tests. Nevertheless, DeSantis said Tuesday that he may use some of the rapid test kits coming to Florida to supplant PCR testing that the state is conducting, saying it would reduce costs by 75 percent.

In all, DeSantis said Florida would receive 6.4 million rapid test kits under the federal government’s plan to provide more than 150 million kits across the nation.

But many questions remain about when and how the test will be available in Flagler.

“I asked about this last weekend,” Snyder said. “Tallahassee reported they’re anxiously awaiting the distribution of these rapid tests. We’ll be thrilled to get them. I do not know when they will be shipped or how many will be provided to each county health department, but rapid testing is a game changer that Dr. Bickel and I have talked about openly for the last several months.” Stephen Bickel is the medical director at the Flagler and Volusia Health Departments. “We believe that having an inexpensive, sensitive, enough tests to help identify those that have the virus with quick test results available will provide nothing but value and benefit our community so those with infections who are contagious, we can take action together immediately.”

Two nursing homes and four local assisted living facilities already have access to a rapid test system. The tests will not involve the much-talked about “spit test,” where the patient spits on a strip of paper. Rather, the tests will still depend on nasal swabs, with the samples applied to a small card that looks like a credit card, itself then run through a testing machine. It’s still not clear where the test will be available. “Hard for me to say how we’re going to use it because we don’t know how many units we’ll be getting,” Snyder said. “But definitely we’ll employ this for larger groups that we’re providing community testing for, and we’re hoping they’ll be used within the school setting also.”

Cases in Florida started declining on July 18 almost as sharply as they’d risen since June 2, but the decline leveled off on Sept. 1, with seven-day averages since remaining in the 2,500-cases-per-day totals, and deaths continuing at a very high rate: there were 106 deaths on Sept. 6 (the graphic the Florida Health Department is showing on its dashboard, indicating a steady and sharp decline in deaths, is extremely misleading, if not outright deceptive. The graph shows the number of deaths confirmed only on the day when they were confirmed as being covid-related. But such confirmations, which come through a laborious process at medical examiner offices, can take days, sometimes weeks, so the further back the date, the higher the number of deaths. If the department were more honestly reporting on its graph the total number of deaths it confirmes each day, a total it does report as a number in its daily report, the graph would not show that decline. The misleading graph is one of a number of ways the state has dissimulated or dissembled the continuing severity of the disease.

The continuing toll of some 2,500 daily cases means that the death toll will continue to follow apace. Florida has a total of 14,316 deaths attributed to covid 19 so far, since the first death was reported the first week of March in the state–an average of 67 deaths per day since then. DeSantis continues to downplay that figure, seldom referring to the death tally at news conferences where he appears without health department officials, medical specialists or scientists. DeSantis himself is a lawyer. The state has tallied just over 700,000 cases, including 3,266 on Tuesday.

Nationally, new covid cases are again rising after summer’s decline–a decline that plateaued at a significantly higher level than when the disease first peaked in April. The seven-day average in the nation in around 43,000 new cases per day, while the number of deaths associated with the disease continues to average around 1,000 pre day. On Tuesday, 918 deaths were reported, for a total of 206,221 so far–half the number of Americans killed in all war theaters during World War II, in almost three and a half years of combat.

“Before we’re done with this, it will kill more people in the U.S. than World War II,” Bickel had said on July 10, six weeks after the toll had reached 100,000.