Florida’s governor lifted the last of Miami’s “Zika zones” on Friday, ending a turbulent months-long health crisis that at one stage threatened to devastate the city’s busy winter tourist season.
During its summer peak, the mosquito-borne virus was infecting dozens of people a week in Miami Beach and the Wynwood arts district, which cover the largest areas of Miami-Dade County’s four zones of active local transmission set up by health officials where outbreaks were most severe.
Hotel and business owners were worried about the potential impact on the $24bn tourism industry, fearing many of Miami’s annual 15 million visitors might stay away if the disease was not eradicated quickly.
The numbers, however, have been steadily declining since September, when the city of Miami Beach began an aggressive aerial spraying program using the controversial insecticide Naled to complement other measures, including street spraying of non-chemical larvicides and removing standing water.
Friday’s lifting of the final Zika zone, covering a 1.5 sq mile area of Miami’s South Beach including the popular hotel district, follows similar steps in Wynwood in September and north Miami Beach late last month.
“Today is a good day,” Governor Rick Scott said at a press conference at the Betsy Hotel on Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive, the eastern border of the zone.
“This has been an interesting year. What’s exciting today is South Beach doesn’t have any local transmission of Zika, and that’s a very good day for our state. What that means is our state has no active transmissions either.
“We’ll continue to welcome all the tourists that come down here, all the people that want to come and enjoy our beaches, our weather, our restaurants, our amusements. We’re going to make sure that everyone knows our state is open for business.”
As of Friday, the Florida department of health reported that there were 980 travel-related cases of Zika statewide, and 249 episodes of local infection, with only four new cases, all outside of Miami-Dade County, recorded this month.
Zika zones are lifted only after 45 days have passed with no new locally transmitted cases of the virus, which can cause flu-like symptoms in otherwise healthy adults but which can be especially harmful to pregnant women and their unborn children. Zika, carried predominantly by the Aedes species of mosquito, was linked to birth defects including severe brain damage and deformities in thousands of cases in Brazil and other South American countries since last year.
The lifting of the last Miami zone also removes the specific warning to pregnant women, or couples considering becoming pregnant, to avoid the area, although more general advice from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to postpone non-essential travel to Miami-Dade County remains in place.
Dr Celeste Philip, Florida’s surgeon general, said she was “as happy as anyone here to be celebrating this milestone” but warned against complacency. “It’s been a long road but we’ve worked hard and our hard work is paying off,” she said.
“While we celebrate this milestone I want to remind everyone that we must remain vigilant. Because Miami is so popular and everyone wants to come here we will continue to see travelers bringing Zika infections into our state, so we must remain on alert and continue all the protective efforts we have been doing.
“That means continuing to use repellent, keeping skin covered as much as possible, and we cannot forget about the risk associated with sexual transmission.”
Bill Talbert, president of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, praised the partnership between state and local officials that led to the elimination of the city’s Zika zones just as the busy winter tourism season was beginning.
“When we kicked this off, particularly on Miami Beach, we said by working together and being optimistic about the future that good things would happen,” he said. “Day and night we’d talk about it, we’d be up at four in the morning but there was never a time we weren’t optimistic that today would happen.
“We’re not going to let guard down and stop doing what we’ve been doing for months, it’s a very competitive marketplace. But look at it here. Close to 80 degrees, and there’s snow in other places.”
