As the state reopens, people across Central Florida find themselves in a sort of purgatory, a place beyond the isolating depths of the quarantine that dominated March and April, but still far from the lives they hope to resume.
People like Rhoda Johnson.
She was recently called back from furlough to her job at the cosmetics counter at Macy’s in Fashion Square mall. But she’s postponed plans to fly to New York to visit family because she doesn’t want to be in crowded public places like airports.
“I’m just not ready yet,” Johnson, 73, said. “I don’t think it’s going be back to normal for most people for a while.”
The response to the coronavirus has brought the most severe and abrupt economic shutdown the nation has ever seen, and fallout from the pandemic has hit Central Florida, which is dominated by tourism and a service wage economy, particularly hard.
In the four weeks since Gov. Ron DeSantis began lifting Florida’s stay-at-home restrictions, people have edged back into their routines: returning to their jobs, eating out and shopping.
To get a better sense of how far the region has come and how far we have to go, the Orlando Sentinel analyzed a variety of data points — from the amount of movement registered through cell phones of local people to the number of flights at Orlando International Airport and even bookings at the Orange County Jail.
Together, the data along with interviews with local officials and people who live here, paint a picture of a so far slow and painful recovery that could take years to reach something resembling the normal Central Florida once knew.
Can’t see the charts? Click here.
Here’s a snapshot of key numbers in our community:
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A traffic counter maintained by the Florida Department of Transportation shows that May brought an increase in the number of cars on Interstate 4 near Universal Orlando and the Orange County Convention Center. Fewer than 40,000 cars a day passed the eastbound counter in late March and throughout April as local and state stay-at-home orders were in place, shows at the convention center canceled and Walt Disney World, Universal and SeaWorld closed.
Now the number of cars passing that point on I-4 is climbing to 60,000, a big improvement, but still far short of the number of cars on the road at the same time last year, which hovered at about 95,000 a day.
Kissimmee resident Bill Christman doesn’t need charts to tell him people are still hesitant to move around in the way they once did. He’s a personal trainer for the LA Fitness in Winter Garden who returned to work on May 25 as gyms started to reopen.
He is seeing a slow trickle of clients. Many people do not seem ready yet to visit a gym, he said.
“A few have reached out to me and said: ‘I know that you’re open, but I’m going to hold off,'” Christman said. “I do have some clients that work in the medical field, but a lot of them are just staying away.”
Before the coronavirus epidemic, Christman trained up to 30 clients in as many as 45 sessions a week. During the last week of May he had only four sessions with a few clients.
“I think people are just scared,” he said. “And I don’t think things are going to return to a complete normal until people feel more assured. … I think personal services, like mine, are definitely going to take a long time to come back.”
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And it’s not just I-4, where construction may deter some motorists, that is slow to recover. Mobility in the region has only picked up to about half of what it was before the pandemic shut down local schools and theme parks.
In Orange County, vehicles collectively traveled more than 120,000,000 miles for the first two Fridays in early March, according to a StreetLight Data, Inc., a company that converted Cuebiq’s cell phone movement data into miles. Cars in Seminole, Osceola and Lake counties, smaller in population compared with Orange, traveled about or just under 30,000,000 miles a day before March 16.
Then those numbers sank to their lowest on Sunday, April 5 for Orange and Seminole. A week later on Easter Sunday, it was the lowest for Lake and Osceola. People are now beginning to move around more, according to the data, but daily peaks haven’t yet reached higher than half of pre-pandemic levels.
In mid-March, as the number of Florida coronavirus cases grew, Malia Hayner, who works in human resources at UCF’s computer science department, started working from her home near downtown Orlando. She also began using her grocery store’s curbside pick-up service, and she and her husband were careful to stay home with their two young children and avoid any possible exposure to the virus.
But after weeks of being cooped up, Hayner, 40, treated herself to a spa appointment last week, complete with a facial and massage.
“I kind of yearned for that moment when I could go back out and feel like nothing had happened, but there’s been that feeling that something has happened and things have changed,” she said.
Hayner said she quickly realized “it’s not going to be the same for a while.”
She’s venturing out more now. She saw some family and friends for Mother’s Day. And she wants to get back to seeing her colleagues on UCF’s campus.
But, like so many, she’s hit with a simultaneous feeling of more confidence about leaving the house and continued uncertainty about her family’s safety when she’ll be back in her office.
“I’m eager to get back to work because I want to get back in the groove and I just want to feel a sense of routine and normalcy as best we can,” Hayner said.
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Perhaps even slower to return will be passengers at Orlando International Airport, which in 2019 was the ninth-busiest airport in the nation ranked by passenger departures, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The number of passengers plummeted after the theme parks shut down March 16 and have barely begun to rebound.
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There is some hope at the airport, which had more than 21,000 employees. The forecast for the number of flights expected this month is higher than May. But the numbers are still far below the non-stop flights coming in and out of 140 destinations that the airport saw during the same period last year.
With a reduced schedule for June, there are 70 domestic and 11 international non-stop destinations. Some places such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Salt Lake City will not have direct service to OIA this month. Miami’s 50 direct flights per week will be half compared to last year. Raleigh-Durham’s 55 will be reduced to five.
OIA Chief Executive Officer Phil Brown has said it could take five years for traffic to fully rebound.
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With travel experiencing its worst slump in modern history, Central Florida’s dependence on tourism is clear in unemployment claims. Though new claims have leveled off in recent weeks, people like Orlando resident Joe Waczewski are not optimistic about a fast recovery.
Waczewski was recently laid off from his job with the Mike Bloomberg campaign and filed for unemployment. The landscape for new work is muddied by the pandemic.
“We are very dependent on foreign visitors and the convention center and the theme parks,” said Waczewski, 52. “I think it will take some time to come back to normal, even if some things are starting to open, such as the theme parks … People just don’t feel confident enough to travel yet.”
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One indication of May and, now June, bringing some relief on the employment front can be seen in the number of people who ride the region’s Lynx buses.
Low-wage and service industry workers are often dependent on the woefully underfunded system to get to work.
On March 3, Lynx had roughly 73,000 passengers ride its buses, an average amount for that month compared to prior years. But by the end of that month, traffic took a nosedive. March saw nearly 1.5 million passengers, a 30 percent drop from a year earlier.
Lynx hit its lowest point on April 16, two weeks after DeSantis ordered Floridians to stay at home. Only 18,250 riders used Lynx that day. A year ago, Lynx had an average daily ridership of about 68,000 in April.
Then on May 5, Lynx ridership began to steadily increase when the agency reported 22,827 passengers. Two weeks later, on May 26, Lynx had about 36,591 riders.
“As more businesses open back up — and with the attractions opening — we’re going to see our ridership numbers creep up,” said Lynx spokesman Matt Friedman. “But we’re not going back to what ridership used to be for some time.”
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Hotel occupancy, long considered a bellweather of the Orlando region’s economy, hit rock bottom during the last week of March in Orange County.
The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons was expected to draw 30,000 people to town that weekend for a conference, but canceled. That, combined with earlier theme park closures and scarce flights at the Orlando airport, pushed occupancy down to 12.1% in Orange and 14.7% in Osceola. Compare that to the same week in 2019 when occupancy in those counties was at 98.2% and 96%, respectively.
Tourism is likely to pick up. Universal began welcoming guests back this week and SeaWorld will follow. Disney will open its parks in July. The convention center is also planning to host the AAU Junior National Volleyball Championships in July, it’s first show in March though with a crowd anticipated to be much smaller than what the tournament typically draws.
The most recent hotel occupancy reports show the numbers ticking up to more than 20% in Orange, still far from what is considered typical during the summer season.
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While hotels are still struggling, hospitals are making a faster move back to more normal operations.
The region’s two largest health systems, AdventHealth and Orlando Health, quickly filled up hospital beds again after spending weeks in March and April keeping patient admissions to a minimum in preparation for a potential surge in coronavirus patients.
That worst case scenario never came and the governor began allowing the hospitals to schedule elective procedures again in May, which means more beds are filled. Together, the two hospital systems are also among the region’s biggest employers with a combined 40,000 doctors, nurses and other staff in the metro area.
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During the first part of 2020, the number of people booked into the Orange County Jail was about on par with what the jail saw last year. But when the pandemic hit and people stopped going out as frequently, the number decreased sharply.
Jail bookings in April were half of the previous April, but since ramped up again. In recent days, protesters demanding justice for George Floyd’s killing have been swept up for disorderly conduct and violating curfew.
The stay-at-home order led to fewer opportunistic crimes, said Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolón. There were fewer cars in parking lots susceptible to break-ins, and empty streets make any kind of mischief easier to spot as more people remained indoors.
“When there’s more opportunity for people to be out and about that usually will translate to more activity for a law enforcement agency if a pandemic was not affecting us,” Rolón said.
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One of the biggest questions as DeSantis pushes Florida’s reopening forward, is whether cases of the coronavirus will jump and by how much.
Restaurants started serving customers at tables again and many shops reopened on May 4, the first day of the state’s “Phase 1” recovery plan. More people also returned to their jobs in May with some resuming commutes to their offices after spending months confined to makeshift desks at home while others were called back from layoffs.
Friday brings DeSantis’ “Phase 2” of the recovery with bars and movie theaters allowed to operate and restaurants moving to full capacity.
The number of local coronavirus cases hit a low in the final week of April heading into May. But cases have picked up slightly in the weeks since. The uptick is, in part, the result of more testing. But the percent of positive cases has also risen two weeks in a row. In Orange County, the positive test rate is expected to inch up from 2% to 3% this week based on earlier figures, a level public health officials may see as the “normal” amount of transmission of the virus until a vaccine is created.
Rhoda Johnson, the Macy’s cosmetics counter employee who returned to work recently, said she’s noticed people are thrilled to be out again. But, she said, she recognizes there could be consequences to that. And it’s unclear how another wave of virus cases could further slow Central Florida’s recovery.
“The customers I wait on — even the men — are saying: ‘I’m so glad to be out shopping. I’m glad you’re open,'” Johnson said. “But the more people start coming out, the more comfortable they get, and then they stop wearing masks and forget about it [coronavirus]. And that’s what worries me.”
Dana Cassidy of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
bkassab@orlandosentinel.com; achen@orlandosentinel.com
