Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has eliminated all statewide coronavirus-related restrictions, allowing college football and NFL teams such as the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Jacksonville Jaguars to stage games at full stadium capacity, a Royal Palm Beach radio station reported Wednesday.
WMEN sports talk radio host Andy Slater posted to Twitter about noon EDT that an unidentified DeSantis spokesperson had told him that the governor had given clearance for the Dolphins to play its games at full capacity. He followed that with a clarification about 40 minutes later.
“DeSantis’ spokesperson follows up with me wanting to make it clear that after the governor recently dropped COVID-19 restrictions, all Florida stadiums were able to go to full capacity,” Slater wrote.
Slater reported in his initial post that the 1-3 Dolphins informed him that it still would limit capacity to about 13,000 in the 65,000-seat Hard Rock Stadium for its next home game on Oct. 25 against the Los Angeles Chargers. Local restrictions apparently remain in effect.
The Dolphins’ CEO Tom Garfinkel told ESPN reporter Cameron Wolf and the Palm Beach Post’s Hal Habib that the team will follow CDC guidelines.
"We'll continue to follow CDC guidelines & put everyone's safety first & monitor things as they go,” Cameron quoted Garfinkel in a Twitter post. “Right now w/ positivity rates where they are, we feel that we can keep people safe in a socially distanced environment, which is our 13K capacity."
The Buccaneers and Jaguars next home games are scheduled for Oct. 18. Florida State’s next home game is set for Saturday against the University of North Carolina, as is the University of Florida, which is set to play Louisiana State.
The announcement comes after a weekend in which two NFL games were postponed due to positive tests among several players.
Florida has been on a steady decline of new daily cases since reaching a seven-day average peak of 11,943 on July 17, falling to a seven-day average of 2,223 as of Tuesday, according to worldometers.info. Its average daily death toll has been below 100 since Sept. 30.
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