Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings Won’t Roll Back Theme Park Reopenings But My Impose Stricter COVID Policies in Orlando
As the COVID-19 numbers in Florida continue to swell, it looks like Walt Disney World’s reopening plans will continue at least for now. Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings gave a press conference yesterday where he said that he was confident with Disney’s safety measures.
In a clip for the conference you can see below, Demings says that he’s not ready to roll back Disney’s reopening plans yet and that he’s not aware of any outbreaks being associated with the parks.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Monday the county is not at the point yet to roll back reopening plans.
Demings said that no outbreaks associated w/ theme parks.
He added: "If there's one place on planet Earth where we can be successful, it would be at Disney [World]." pic.twitter.com/2Re2V2UIJb
— Ashley Carter (@AshleyLCarter1) July 13, 2020
During the clip above, Demings says, “If there’s one place on planet Earth where we can be successful, it would be Disney World. ”
That being said, according to a recent piece in the Orlando Business Journal, Mayor Demings is considering new curfew rules and/or penalties for not wearing a mask and numbers in Florida continue skyrocket. Just two days before the Mayor’s press conference, the state of Florida had its largest single-day count of cases with 15,283 new cases confirmed in one day according to the Department of Health.
Demings said that an increase of restrictions would be driven by the total number of hospital beds including in ICU’s in the county as well as the number of positive cases in the area. At the moment, Demings says, “We have not exceeded capacity within our hospitals.” However, according to the piece in the Orlando Business Journal, a bigger concern is there being enough healthcare staff in the area that can handle the influx of new patients. This is according to Dr. Raul Pino who said that the availability of personal protective equipment is also a concern.
In an abundance of caution, the county is in discussion with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers about using the Orange County Convention Center as a 500 bed field hospital for the region. This would be done ONLY if there was no capacity at the local hospitals.
As of yesterday, Florida has a total of 282,435 confirmed cases of COVID-19 this included 18,498 hospitalizations and 4381 related deaths. In Orange County there is has been a total of 18,937 cases, 564 hospitalizations and 83 deaths.
This is a story that we’ll continue to following. Keep checking in with MickeyBlog for further news and updates!
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Source: Orlando Business Journal