"I think it's going to have a huge impact," Mayor Francis Suarez told CNN Saturday about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' decision to allow restaurants, bars and other businesses to open at full capacity and to suspend fines for all outstanding penalties issued to those who didn't follow Covid-19 restrictions -- such as not wearing a mask in public. "You know, I just don't know how many people are actually going to do it now."
DeSantis signed an executive order on Friday evening allowing restaurants and bars to immediately begin operating at 100% capacity. He cited the economic hardships of not operating businesses at full capacity, according to the order.
Suarez said mandating mask wearing in public and slowly reopening has helped to keep the coronavirus case count down in Miami.
There have been nearly 700,000 cases of coronavirus in Florida and the virus has killed more than 14,000 people in the state, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Nationwide, more than 7 million people have been infected and 204,497 have died.
Suarez said he's concerned that the changes in the state are coming as flu season ramps up and schools prepare for in-person learning to begin in mid-October.
"We'll see in the next couple of weeks whether he's right about his perspective. But if he's wrong about his perspective ... it's going to be very, very, very difficult for him and it's going to be a very difficult time, because it's in the middle of flu season," Suarez said.
A winter surge could be on the horizon
The US could see an explosion of Covid-19 cases in the fall and winter as people exercise less caution and spend more time indoors, where there is a greater likelihood of transmission, according to Dr. Chris Murray, director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
Murray says the IHME model shows a "huge surge" expected to take off in October "and accelerate in November and December." The IHME model indicates that the country is currently seeing about 765 daily deaths from Covid-19, but that number could jump to 3,000 daily deaths by late December.
Over the summer, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Robert Redfield warned the fall and winter could be "one of the most difficult times that we experienced in American public health." And with daily cases averaging 40,000 nationwide, the new season could be a challenge, infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
"You don't want to enter into the fall and winter with a community spread at that level, because if you do, you got a difficult situation that's going to be really challenging," Fauci told JAMA Editor in Chief Dr. Howard Bauchner.
A winter surge could already be brewing in Europe, Murray said.
"Cases are exploding there. So we know it's coming and we expect it to hit the US pretty soon," Murray said.
Normal could be a long way off -- even with a vaccine
Fauci says Covid-19 vaccinations could "very likely" start in November or December. But it could still be a while until the US is back
