Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez Claims City, State’s Actual Covid-19 Cases Likely ‘Way Undercounted’ by a Factor of 10

Miami-Dade County, Florida Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced a new nighttime curfew, rollbacks on indoor dining at restaurants and bars, and a shutdown of all gyms on Monday, while also claiming that the actual number of Covid-19 cases he has seen in his city are “way undercounted by a factor of 10.”

Speaking with CNN Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer, Gimenez reviewed the surging pandemic in his county and said the alarming number of new cases have forced him to rapidly pull back on reopening plans. Gimenez’s cautionary approach struck a notable different tone than Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who publicly defended Donald Trump’s comments on Monday where the president falsely claimed that the virus is “totally harmless” in 99 percent of people who contract it.

DeSantis has been one of the most vocal governors advocating for a rapid reopening and aggressively attacked the press after a White House visit on May 20 for having been proven wrong by the lack of cases in his state, despite his decision to relax shutdown rules for many businesses earlier than the rest of the country. Weeks later, however DeSantis has faced a furious backlash and public mockery as new Covid-19 cases in Florida have spiked to the highest levels in the country.

“I’m wondering why the Governor DeSantis continues to say this is simply the result of doing more testing. Is he wrong?”

“No, well, look the more testing you do, the more people you’re going to see are going to come up positive,” Gimenez said. “We did a medical study in Miami-Dade over two months ago that we know already 200,000 people had tested positive. Then we took the positive rate, we put that out, 200,000 people would test positive to the antibody. So the official number that you see, especially in Miami-Dade, we have about 40,000, we know it’s way undercounted probably by a factor of ten. And I expect the same thing in the state of Florida. So the more testing you, do the more people you’re going to find that have it. Our problem isn’t so much the number as it is the percentage. So we were testing at about an 8% positive rate of the numbers of tests that were being conducted. Now we’re over 20%. That’s the real issue.”

The veracity of Florida’s official coronavirus data has come under scrutiny, especially after the state’s lead official tracking coronavirus cases was abruptly fired in May. She claimed her dismissal was retribution for being too “transparent” about the true extent of the state’s Covid-19 outbreak.

“When you correlate that with the increase in hospitalizations, then you know you have an uptick in the infection rate here,” Gimenez added. “We need to bring that down below 10%. So we have to roll back some of the things that we did. Our problem too is that a lot of people didn’t take personal responsibility. They didn’t wear their masks. They didn’t wear their masks outdoors when they were within six feet. Those rules have been in place since mid-April. And unfortunately a lot of our young people are not complying with those rules. They are getting together, they’re partying and they’re not wearing their mask. And this contagion really took off with that young demographic.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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