MIAMI — Miami-Dade County’s midnight curfew will be lifted the night of April 12, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced Monday.
At a news conference, Levine Cava said her administration considered all available data in deciding to lift the countywide COVID-19 curfew and roll out a new set of guidelines meant to help businesses stem the spread of the virus while getting back to work. Beginning the evening of April 12 — more than nine months after the curfew was first put in place — businesses in Miami-Dade County can operate past midnight.
Even though the COVID test positivity rate has not reached a benchmark Levine Cava had previously set to lift the curfew, the mayor and her team said the decreasing number of people needing critical care treatment and increasing vaccination availability influenced her decision.
“We developed these new guidelines based on the current status of the COVID response, the availability of the vaccine, the aggressive campaign that we’re mounting,” Levine Cava said outside the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in Miami. “We considered all the available data, including the 14-day positivity rate, and also hospitalization from COVID and death rates. These have all declined significantly as vaccinations for the most vulnerable has expanded and our overall vaccination program has progressed.”
Levine Cava also announced Monday that she is implementing streamlined COVID-19 safety rules for residents and businesses to replace the county’s comprehensive “New Normal” guidelines that were first imposed by Levine Cava’s predecessor, Carlos Gimenez, last summer.
Levine Cava said the new, eased regulations will allow childcare centers to double capacity, senior centers to resume programs and public water fountains to run again, under certain protocols. The mayor’s office will publish a full set of updated guidelines Monday. The new rules will go into effect Tuesday.
Nancy Torre, a 26-year employee at Miami International Airport and member of hospitality union Unite Here Local 355, said during the press conference that workers across the tourism and hospitality industry are eager to get back on the job now that vaccines are widely available and business restrictions are starting to ease.
“We all need to work. We lost our jobs due to COVID. Some have been called back, but we all need to get back to work,” she said. “We are the face of tourism here, and so we need to work safely, vaccinated and with social distancing and masks on.”
The previous guidelines offered detailed mandates for businesses on everything from what to do when an employee tests positive to how often to sanitize equipment. The mayor said the new safety guidelines are more laser-focused on the core precautions to prevent virus spread: wearing masks, social distancing, hand sanitizing and staying home if you have COVID-19 symptoms.
Levine Cava had been targeting Monday as the date to lift the curfew that forces businesses to stay closed between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. In a March 5 memo to county commissioners, the mayor said she would lift the curfew on April 5 if COVID-19 conditions improved and if the two-week average of positive test results countywide hit 5.5% or less.
As of Sunday, that number was 6.4%, slightly higher than it was both a week earlier and a month earlier.
But Levine Cava’s chief medical officer, Dr. Peter Paige, said Monday that the county expected a little bit of an increase in the positivity rate with the amount of activity in Miami this spring. The county, especially Miami Beach, has been a popular destination for spring breakers.
“We thought we’d get a little bump but it really hasn’t been as bad as we thought it could have been,” he said. “So that’s also a positive.”
Levine Cava’s announcement comes amid pressure to lift the county’s COVID-19 curfew. Miami-Dade remains the only county in Florida ordering restaurants, bars and other businesses deemed non-essential to shut down at midnight.
Several business owners urged all adults to get vaccinated and touted the vaccine as a key to revving Miami-Dade’s tourism and hospitality engine again. David Grutman, founder of Groot Hospitality and owner of at least one establishment that was shut down last summer for violating COVID-19 restrictions, said despite his sector’s struggles through the pandemic, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
“The fact that we’re able to roll out vaccines so quickly and act so quickly to get us back open, it’s amazing,” he said.
When Levine Cava extended the midnight curfew through March, it irked some county commissioners and restaurant owners. A group of Wynwood bars and restaurants filed a challenge to the curfew in federal court, arguing that the county failed to present evidence that COVID-19 “is more likely to spread ... during late-night hours as opposed to daytime hours.”
But Levine Cava has publicly defended the measure.
“I know many are eager to eliminate the curfew,” she said March 29 during the Miami Herald’s Florida Priorities panel discussion. “But let’s just say, from midnight to 6, a lot of people are not on their guard. They may be partying. They may be having more to drink. ... We don’t want to have these super-spreader events.”
In the South Beach entertainment district, the epicenter of spring break revelry and a resulting backlash from Miami Beach officials, an even stricter 8 p.m. curfew remains in place on weekends. City officials voted last month to keep the restrictions in place until April 12, when they expect spring break to wind down.
Gimenez, the former mayor, now a Republican congressman, first imposed a countywide curfew in July as a surge of COVID-19 infections spread through the population. The curfew started at 10 p.m. then, but was moved back to midnight.
So far, Miami-Dade has fended off court challenges to its curfew. Broward County imposed its own curfew in late December, but a federal judge blocked it.
Monday is the first day that all adults in Florida are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, a shift that leaders in Miami-Dade hope will help drive numbers down.
More than 458,000 of the county’s approximately 2.7 million residents have received a complete COVID-19 vaccine series (one dose of Johnson & Johnson or two doses of Pfizer or Moderna), and another 335,000 have received a first dose. Levine Cava noted that she was among the Miami-Dade residents who’d received at least one dose, and said she was planning to visit her grandkids by the end of the month.
Case numbers have gone in the wrong direction lately, especially among Miami-Dade’s younger population. An analysis last week by University of South Florida professor Jason Salemi showed that, over the previous two weeks, cases in people 18-24 in Miami-Dade had increased by 39%.
Variants of the the virus and a particular mutation have caused concern among researchers in recent weeks.
The deadly virus is still circulating at substantial rates in Florida, especially in Miami-Dade, where there are about 47 daily cases per 100,000 people.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers anywhere between five and 50 daily cases per 100,000 people “moderate” spread, while anything above that is considered “high” spread.
