Business Law 101 / Coronavirus Statistical Benchmark in Monroe County

By Albert L. Kelley, Esq.

Today’s column will not discuss law; it will discuss numbers.  Before I went to law school, I spent nine years in college majoring in sciences: biology, medicine, and political sciences.  Through my majors, I spent numerous semesters studying statistics.  I learned about research and number crunching.  To this day I still look at things through the eyes of a scientist. On August 8, 2020, Monroe County hit a milestone.  We passed the point where one out of every 50 people who live in the County have been infected with coronavirus. The most recent population count for Monroe County is 74,228 people.  As of yesterday, the official count of just residents who have been infected reached 1,488.  Less than a day later it had reached one in every 48 people. This number is slightly better than the State average.  Florida as a state reached the 1 in 50 target n July 28, with over 433,420 cases.  As of June 8, 2020 the infection rate in Florida is one in every 41 people. The United States as a whole is slightly better than Florida with a current rate of one in every 66 people. Now I understand that many of these people are no longer infected. But as the odds get worse, the chance of getting sick increases.

To think of these numbers in relation to population, the number of people in Monroe County who have been infected equals the entire city of Boca Grande, Florida; the number of people statewide exceeds the population of St. Petersburg and Orlando combined. The number of people infected in the United States exceeds the population of South Carolina.

While we are lucky that the number of deaths in Monroe County has remained low (less than one out of every 5,700 people), statewide, that number is nearly double that (one out of every 2,606 people), which is slightly better than the national rate (one in every 1,992 people).  To put these numbers in perspective, the number of Florida deaths exceeds the population of Brooksville, FL and the number of deaths nationally exceeds the population of Hollywood, Florida.

I believe it is important to keep track of these numbers, and to put them into perspective.  It took Florida from March 1 to July 8 (129 days) to reach one in 100 people, but only 20 days to reach one in 50. In the 10 days since Florida hit the 1-50 mark, there were 91,000 new cases bring us to 1-41 people. During the same 10-day time period, the United States went from1-76 to 1-66* people.

I also look at the survival rate. Monroe County has a survival rate of 99%, Florida is 84% and the US is 96%. While these numbers look exceedingly high, the problem is we don’t know which patients will be the ones that don’t survive and for those that do, there are increasing stories of long-lasting physical problems.

I don’t have answers or pretend to. I leave that to the scientists in the laboratories and the doctors in the hospitals. But I do see the trends and try to do my best to stay safe until a solution is found.

Al Kelley is a Florida business law attorney located in Key West and previously taught business law, personnel law and labor law at St. Leo University.  He is the author of four law books available through Absolutely Amazing e-Books and the host of “Basics Of The Law, a weekly YouTube channel. This article is being offered as a public service and is not intended to provide specific legal advice.  If you have any questions about legal issues, you should confer with a licensed Florida attorney.

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