The mayor of Miami-Dade County said Sunday the reopening of schools amid a troubling increase in coronavirus cases in Florida will be a “local” issue “guided by science.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mayor Carlos Gimenez said the decision will be tough because it depends on the spread of the virus.
“It's local here, and we’re a hot spot,” he said. “So I've teamed up with the superintendent —we're going to work together to find the solution. We don't know what this virus is going to look like six weeks from now when the school system is supposed to open up.”
“It's all going to be guided by our science,” he said of final school reopening plans in Miami-Dade County. “It's all going to be guided by our number one priority is keeping our kids safe…. the number one goal is to try to get them back in the classroom. But, hey, it all depends on the virus and what it's doing here at that time.”
Gimenez said if there’s a GOP convention in Florida next month, it won’t be in his county.
“The positivity rate and the state of the virus in this community forced us to close those spaces,” he said. “So you can't have it here in Miami-Dade. I'm not sure what's going on in Jacksonville.”
Gimenez also weighed in on President Donald Trump’s Florida visit during which he did not wear a mask as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised.
“I was on the tarmac to greet him,” he said. “And myself and everybody else that was there was tested an hour before. He kept his distance. They take care of the president. We take our measures here and it's local in nature.”
“What I'm asking, our citizens in Miami-Dade, because we have such a high positivity rate and it's been this way since April that it's the way that we act that we have to keep our masks on inside and out,” he said. “We have to keep our distance. We have to wash our hands. And if we all do that, then we're going to be able to tamp down the virus.”
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