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Following the Governor’s release of the names of nursing homes and assisted living facilities with confirmed coronavirus cases, groups representing the facilities are pointing out errors.

The move to release the names came as pressure mounted from the media and groups like AARP for access to the data.

“It will actually be a double security because all of these facilities are required to notify the families and required to notify the other residents and staff,” said Governor Ron DeSantis.

Jeff Johnson with AARP believes it was a step in the right direction.

“Giving them some peace of mind about what’s going on in the facility where their loved one is,” said Johnson.

But Kristen Knapp with the Florida Health Care Association told us they’re already seeing unintended consequences.

She gave us an example from a facility in the Panhandle with confirmed cases.

“Now the local daycare won’t care for the children of those staff,” said Knapp.

The state’s list includes more than 300 facilities, and it didn’t take long for groups to start finding errors.

“We saw about 20 that were on the list,” said Kanpp.

Knapp said the discrepancies have resulted in unwarranted criticism of numerous facilities.

“That causes anxiety for the family members who may feel like they were not properly informed. It causes anxiety for staff who are wondering why they didn’t know when in fact that information isn’t correct,” said Kanpp.

While nursing home and ALF groups are working to identify facilities incorrectly added to the list, there have also been some media reports of facilities with confirmed cases that have been excluded from the list.

Since the list was first released this past weekend some of the errors have been corrected, but facilities say it’s an ongoing process.

Johnson agrees there’s room for improvement.

“Either with the state adding additional information in its reporting or the facilities being more proactive and transparent,” said Johnson.

There are about 3,500 nursing homes and ALFs in the state, so as of now the vast majority remain coronavirus free.

You can find the most up to date list of facilities here.

The Re-Open Florida task force’s first discussion Tuesday was on how to reopen the state’s tourism and hospitality industries.

It began with an assessment of the damage done so far, and industry representatives said we all have to feel thats it’s safe to start going back out.

The Governor said reopening the state won’t be based only on essential versus non-essential, but what low risk activities can resume, then move medium and high risk activities.

“How do you do things that are going to minimize risk. If people can fight over toilet paper at Costco, then I gotta think there is a way you can run a restaurant safely,” said Governor Ron DeSantis.

The Industry is anxious.

Tourism and Hospitality are a $6 billion revenue generator for the state, making up almost 20 percent of the state’s sales tax collections.

Slides produced by Visit Florida paint a bleak picture.

Since March first, the demand for hotels rooms is rock bottom, worse in Florida than the nation.

New Vacation Bookings have cratered, air travel is off by more than half and international travel down by 82 percent.

“The clearer we can get on the direction of the date is probably the biggest thing we can ask as we plan for the future how to get open,” said Tim Petrillo Co-Founder & CEO of The Restaurant People.

The consensus: The public needs to feel safe.

“People want to know that they can go to places and be safe and enjoy whatever it is they want to enjoy. Food, beverages, what have you,” said Jose Cil, CEO of Restaurant Brands International.

Airports must do their part said CEO of Tampa International Joe Lopano.

“This involves fogging high touch areas, increased cleaning, signage about social distancing,” said Lopano.

And the CEO of Burger King told the panel that tourism and hospitality providers should consider paying people showing symptoms for at least two weeks to keep them from showing up for work.

They generally do not get paid time off, but the move would make the public feel safer.

We’ve been asking state officials for a date when life will at least partially re-open.

So far they’ve not given us anything concrete, but we are getting closer.

Tuesday was the 17th day in row new cases have been below the peak hit on April 3rd.

Governor Ron DeSantis’ reopening task force met for the first time Monday to discuss short term ways to relax some measures put in place due to the coronavirus.

Going forward, the task force will also look at reopening plans for the medium and long term.

“We want to see people back to work for the long haul and we want to continue with Florida’s economic development strategy,” said DeSantis.

The task force is comprised of business leaders, lawmakers, local officials and more, but Florida Democrats on a video conference Monday said the opinion that holds the most weight is that of public health officials.

Dr. Brent Schillinger, Former President of the Palm Beach County Medical Society warned the Governor to not move too fast and potentially create a second wave of infections.

“If we lift the restrictions too soon we’re likely to see a huge influx of cases here,” said Schillinger.

Florida Democratic Party Chair Terrie Rizzo argued testing needs to be dramatically increased before reopening is considered.

“While I think it’s important to start thinking about how to safely reopen our state and our country we can only do it by solving the health crisis first. Trump and DeSantis are putting the stock market first, not the health and safety of our people,” said Rizzo.

Specifically, Rizzo said 500,000 tests should be conducted a day nationwide to reopen the country.

That number currently stands at 145,000 tests a day.

The Governor said Saturday he will assemble a separate task force, specifically to look at ways of scaling up testing.

“We’ll definitely have an agreement with some lab to do high-throughput within the coming days and then we very well may see our state labs beefed up,” said DeSantis.

But Democrats like State Senator Lori Berman argue until those testing capabilities are actually implemented, it’s too soon to reopen.

“Saying that the curve is flattening and we can start lifting restrictions is like saying the parachute has slowed our rate of decent and now we can take it off,” said Berman.

The Governor has said he has no intention of loosening restrictions on nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

If anything, he said restrictions might actually be tightened to protect the high risk populations.

Monday was the tenth anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The months long flow of oil into the Gulf devastated tourism from one end of the Gulf coast to the other.

Kim Ross of Rethink Energy said there is still a chance of major oil spills and that now as the state faces another crisis, green energy should be part of any restarting of the economy.

“And I encourage people to take action to really let their elected leaders know that we need to shift to renewable energy. As we start thinking about restarting the economy, that’s a perfect time to really start that shift. If we’ve got to restart, let’s put some emphasis on green jobs, let’s put some emphasis on solar and renewable energy as we start back up,” said Ross.

Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Ross says citizens should urge their political leaders to move the state to more green energy.

Frustration continues to build over the inability to file an unemployment claim.

A two car parade circled the Department of Economic Opportunity headquarters in the state capitol Monday afternoon.

For Shena Osborne, she filed six weeks ago, was approved, but hasn’t gotten a check.

She’s asking what a lot are asking for, retroactive payments to the day she was let go.

“It’s saying I’ve already lost three weeks. They expired. You’re not getting your money unless you claim your weeks and it’s still like that. It’s saying I still have weeks available to claim, but you can’t claim them and you’re not getting anything until you claim your weeks, but you can’t claim your weeks. You cannot get into the system. It kicks you out. The new site they created, it has an option for you to claim your weeks, but it’s not allowing you to claim your weeks,” said Osborne.

And we’ve asked the agency about retroactivity.

We were told it’s on their radar, but still haven’t gotten a solid answer.

More than 300,000 Floridians applied for unemployment in March, driving the rate from 2.8 percent to 4.3 percent.

The numbers don’t reflect the half million more who have already applied in April.

Checks to some of the first filers are in the mail, but it’s a small percentage of those waiting.

On Thursday, the Governor finally got a little bit of good news from his own unemployment agency.

121,000 checks are in the mail.

“This includes 33,623 individual Floridians who applied for reemployment benefits after this economic upheaval in the middle of March,” said Governor Ron DeSantis.

That equates to about ten percent of those who applied in March.

But the overall number of those who have filed since the pandemic began is much higher.

“It’s in the eight to 850,000 range,” said DMS Secretary Jonathan Satter.

Just four percent of those applying are seeing help.

Satter, who was recently appointed to fix the system, likened it to asking a seven-year-old car to do too much.

“We just loaded the car with a lot of passengers, and we are expecting the car to drive ten times as fast as it was built for, so we occasionally have to take the car in for a pit stop,” said Satter.

For the last two nights, the agency has shutdown its computer system from 8 PM to 8 AM installing upgrades, but more problems still need to be fixed.

Recently unemployed Scott Read spent more than two weeks trying to file.

Once filed, he’s been faced with getting kicked off the system.
“I approached the website at 7:59 this morning and then as you go through the screens, it gets progressively slower and slower. And then at some point I get pushed out and pushed back to the login,” said Read.

But an order signed Thursday, waives the requirement applicants must certify their claim every two weeks.

Satter said that will immediately clear 80,000 more people to get a check.

The unemployment computer system will be out again Friday night and every night through the middle of next week to install upgrades.

A new Florida law is being invoked in an attempt to block voters from voting on legalizing recreational marijuana on the 2022 ballot.

Ultimately, it will be up to the Florida Supreme Court to decide.

A new law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis just over a week ago is already being used to thwart an effort to legalize recreational marijuana.

The Florida Senate recommended the state Supreme Court consider the new law when it decides whether to let the amendment go to the ballot.

“There are a whole range of new requirements,” said Jeff Sharkey with the Medical Marijuana Business Association of Florida.

Previously the Supreme Court could only strike down a ballot initiative for confusing or misleading voters or containing more than one subject, but the new law will also require the Supreme Court to consider if proposed amendments violate the US Constitution.

Florida’s Attorney General and other opponents have argued the amendment doesn’t inform voters that the federal marijuana prohibition would still be in effect.

That same fact could raise constitutional issues as well.

“You can make that argument, but again if you look back at 2016, the medical marijuana ballot initiative, this issue was never brought up and multiple states, more than 40 states across the United States have either a medical or an adult use recreational initiative. So I think that argument is a little weak,” said Sharkey.

Even if the Supreme Court does allow the amendment to go forward, new signature expiration dates and increased costs to count petitions are guaranteed to make it harder for the initiative to reach the ballot.

“For all of these citizen initiatives it’s going to have a chilling effect for sure,” said Sharkey.

Nick Hansen, Chair of the Make it Legal Florida Campaign tells us he expects the campaign will be able to reach the signature goal for the 2022 ballot.

He anticipates it could take as little as a month to reach the threshold following the Supreme Court review.

The Supreme Court is set to hear the case on May 6th, in its first ever video conference due to the coronavirus.

Governor Ron DeSantis has pushed aside the man running the state’s unemployment office and put the man who orchestrated dozens of new servers for the office in charge.

Floridians have filed roughly 650,000 unemployment claims, but getting hard information from the Department of Economic Opportunity has been difficult, even for the Governor.

“And I want to know, like every morning, I should have, know how many claims have been paid. Right now, its hard for me to even get those numbers, and that’s unacceptable,” said Governor Ron DeSantis.

Because of that, the Governor has now named Jonathan Satter to oversee unemployment operations.

“It is a gigantic challenge, but it is not overwhelming. And purposefully, we have designed this to be in bite size pieces,” said Satter.

Satter remains the head of the state’s technology and management agency.

In that role he was the architect of adding dozens of new cloud servers, which has helped speed up the filing of claims.

“We basically have assembled a swat team with one objective and that is how do we pay Floridians quicker, and so we are looking at everything,” said Satter.

The Governor wants answers quickly.

“I’d like to be able to come out and say X number of claims went out yesterday, X number of checks are going to go out by five o’clock, or whatever,” said DeSantis.

Satter has decades of experience in real estate management.

He also chaired a hospital board with a $250 million budget.

He’s been in Government just over a year.

“We’re hopeful. We think we’ve identified some problems. And we’ve identified some solutions. It will take us as little bit of time to get those implemented,” said Satter.

Satter believes unemployed Floridians will see big improvements by the middle of the week.

DEO Director Ken Lawson remains at the agency handling economic development initiatives, but the responsibility for improving unemployment is all Satter.

Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to announce a task force this week that will look at how to reopen Florida when the coronavirus pandemic slows.

“They’re going to look at all different sectors of the economy. You know, what does a restaurant look like kind of in the era going forward?” said DeSantis.

Concerned about Floridians’ mental health, the Governor hopes restarting certain professional sporting events may give people a sense of normalcy.

“I’d like to see, you know, Woods and Mickelson do the golf or whatever because that’s social distance. You wouldn’t have a gallery there, you wouldn’t have crowds, but to put that on TV. I think people have been starved for content,” said DeSantis.

The state is allowing the WWE to film in Orlando and made a similar offer to the UFC.

There are also reportedly discussions in the works to potentially proceed with the MLB’s Spring training in Florida.

Melanie Brown-Woofter with the Florida Behavioral Health Association said it could help, so long as the right public health measures are in place.

“Being able to keep to your normal routine is really important, especially in times like these,” said Brown-Woofter. “We just have to be able to balance those activities that we did prior to the social distancing and the physical distancing with where we are now.”

But DeSantis is also worried about Floridian’s physical health, suggesting gyms and other recreation may be beneficial.

“Obesity is like the number one factor in whether you really get hit hard by COVID-19 and so my fear has been kind of in the last month and continue going I wonder how the physical activity has been,” said DeSantis.

At the same time the Governor is discussing loosening restrictions, the state’s Surgeon General has said he believes social distancing measures will be necessary until there’s a vaccine, which is likely at least a year away.

For those struggling with mental health issues during the pandemic you can visit FloridaBHA.org or HopeForHealingFL.com to find resources.

Governor Ron DeSantis said he has not yet made a decision on whether students can return to the classroom before the school year ends.

Right now, his order suspends on campus learning until May first, but he’s getting plenty of advice to continue distance learning thought the end of the school year.

Tallahassee Community College is already telling students and staff that summer classes will be online, but other colleges are waiting to make a decision.

When it comes to public schools, the decision will be a statewide one.

“It doesn’t mean that they are going to go back. But I think we just need to get down this road a bit further,” said DeSantis.

The state’s teacher union wrote the Governor, urging him to keep schools closed for the rest of the year despite what it says are ongoing problems with the availability of online learning.

“If we can assure the health and safety of our students and those who take care of students everyday, then we can support the progress of going back to school. If we can not, and that questions is already answered. We can not. We don’t have enough tests,” said Fedrick Ingram, President of the Florida Education Association.

A soon to be announced task force will weigh in on the options, not only for the rest of this school year, but Summer, Fall and beyond.

“You know.maybe there’ll be an anti viral developed. We don’t know how this thing is gonna- Is there going to be this wave and then a second wave comes back in the Fall? So there’s a lot of things that you need to be prepared for. So they are going to look at all this stuff with education,” said DeSantis.

In addition to the teachers union, the superintendent here in the state’s capital city wrote the Governor on Wednesday, urging him to keep schools closed for the rest of the year.

The Governor said any decision on when schools open with be made after consulting with superintendents and parents.

But for parents juggling working from home and homeschooling, a decision can’t come soon enough.

Florida farmers are struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic, with restaurants closed or reduced business decreasing the demand for produce, but news the federal government may soon approve Florida’s hemp cultivation plan farmers could be a saving grace.

Florida’s farmers are having to throw out up to 70 percent of their crops due to a lack of demand amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“A lot of our farmers were selling directly to restaurants, were selling directly to the cruise line industry or even to Disney,” said Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried.

Fried said saving the Ag industry is pivotal in order to restart the economy.

“Agriculture has always been the second economic driver with two million jobs across the state, 47,000 working farms and ranches. That’s a $137 billion economic impact. And when the economy is so reliant on tourism, and unfortunately now tourism is at a dead stop, agriculture is gonna be, if not already, the number one economic driver,” said Fried.

But farmers could soon find help in hemp, with the federal government expected to approve the state’s cultivation plan as early as this week.

“This can potentially be a 20 or 30 billion dollar industry for the State of Florida,” said Fried.

And hemp grown in Florida means stores selling hemp products like CBD will be able to end their reliance on out of state product.

“The hemp economy market here in the states has been booming, but all of the money has been leaving the State of Florida and going elsewhere,” said Gabe Suarez, owner of Natural Life, a Florid based CBD chain. “Every time one of my businesses purchases any kind of hemp it’s purchased from a farm outside of the state. We can finally keep that money in Florida, which indirectly will help all economies throughout the state.”

The Commissioner of Agriculture anticipates 3,000 initial cultivation applications and expects to begin approving them by the end of the month.

To qualify for a hemp cultivation license the crop must be grown on land zoned for agriculture or industrial purposes and license holders cannot have been convicted of a narcotics felony within the past ten years.

The private Insurance market is bracing for a mountain of claims ranging from workers compensation to business interruption, even though a pandemic is excluded from most policies.

The state and some local governments are now ordering some coverages anyway, raising the question of fairness.

Most business interruption policies exclude pandemics and require that there be physical damage to the businesses location to qualify, but at least one Florida county’s emergency order declares that the virus is causing physical damage to the business.

Experts like Chip Merlin, a Policy Holders Attorney, said if you have the coverage file now.

“The first duty that the owner of an insurance policy has it to report a loss. And they have to do that promptly, immediately, within a reasonable time after they are shut down,” said Merlin.

Insurance Consultant Lisa Miller offered the same advice.

“Even though you have language that clearly excludes it,” said Miller.

She believes the Federal Government will set up a fund to cover some business losses.

“There’s a thirty-some page proposed bill sitting in Congress right now that would set up a federal fund to pay these claims,” said Miller.

And people who think they got infected at work may be able to get help through Workers Comp insurance.

A state memo urges insurers to cover employees who get infected including first responders.

“Basically telling all carriers that they should advocate and consider doing this with their policies,” said Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis.

All those we spoke with said protecting your rights now is important.

“And when you start talking about probabilities and odds, who knows what’s going to happen with various state legislatures,” said Merlin.

In the end all of us are going to pick up the cost of this pandemic.

Either through higher taxes because of a government bailout, or because we fund a guarantee fund that bails out bankrupt insurance companies.

Insurance expert Lisa Miller believes the federal bailout fund for business interruption could be as much as $500 billion.

Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture had launched a one-stop shop for Florida farmers to find customers and assistance amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Keep Florida Growing webpage offers a platform for Floridians and businesses to find local farmers and ranchers they can purchase product from in order to help keep the state’s agriculture industry afloat.

The site also provides farmers with information on SBA loans, USDA assistance, and state emergency bridge loans.

“My guess is that agriculture has become the number one economic driver in our state and so we need to do everything we can to really lift up this industry and make sure that our economy can at least rely on agriculture during these hard times,” said Ag Commissioner Nikki Fried.

The page can be found by clicking here.

A major industrial printing company in the state’s capital city is finding a new purpose as health workers across the country struggle to find personal protective equipment.

Altrua Global Solutions makes signage for large companies like McDonalds, but after the coronavirus struck their signs shifted from promotional, to reminding people businesses were still open.

“For us, I felt like we were helping save some jobs out there,” said owner Melode Smelko.

Melode and her husband Skip soon discovered another way they could help.

“We also saw a couple YouTube videos of folks making masks and I said, that’s our machinery right there, the face shields that’s our machinery. We can do this,” said Melode.

Within 48 hours they had a prototype face shield.

A few days later, they’re now able to produce 1,000 a day.

They’ll soon have the capacity to produce a total of 12,000 face shields to be shipped across the country.

“And it was to help our team too. It’s like everybody else. Everybody’s kind of wondering what’s going to happen in their jobs and everything and this was just another way for us to be able to give back to our team saying, hey you’re here and we’re in good shape,” said Skip.

They’ve also imported 10,000 face masks to distribute.

Within the next few days they expect to produce thousands of face masks in shop, offsetting some reliance on foreign suppliers.

“There’s a lot of manufacturing in this country and obviously we can all switch over to do what we need to do,” said Melode.

And Altrua is still producing signs, giving out free ‘We’re Open’ signs to local restaurants and putting up signs across the community thanking first responders.

“Printing signs is easy for us and that’s something we can give back to make people feel good around our community,” said Melode.

While the face shields will be going to health workers, the face masks Altrua produces will be going to restaurants and other essential businesses to protect their employees.