In some ways it’s difficult to believe that this month marks five years since the COVID-19 pandemic first made its impact felt across the globe.

Southwest Florida, like just about everywhere else on the planet, went into quarantine in March 2020, with restaurants, entertainment venues, many businesses and public spaces including beaches closing to help prevent spread of the deadly virus. They reopened — those that did manage to reopen — on varying timelines, with most being at least partially active by the end of the first year of the pandemic, as factors such as masking, social distancing and the advent of different vaccines combined to help reduce the spread of the virus.

Health care systems and providers were strained to the breaking point as the number of cases, and the number of deaths, continued to grow. Tourism tanked, and real estate prices skyrocketed as people from other states moved to “the free state of Florida.”

The federal COVID-19 public health emergency officially ended in May 2023, according to the American Public Health Association. But how have the business and health care communities rebounded across the state and, specifically, in Southwest Florida?

Florida economy bounced back strong

Mark Wilson, president and CEO of the Florida Chamber of Commerce in Tallahassee, said in a written response to questions about the state’s overall business recovery that he is convinced that when the history books are written on COVID-19, “Florida will emerge as a top-five global example of a place that got it right.”

He said the state’s pro-business climate continues to drive record economic growth. “Florida has proven to be a global leader in economic resilience as we approach five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he says, adding that while the pandemic brought unprecedented challenges, including an increase in business closures, Florida now sees more than 50,000 new business formations monthly — more than any other state.

Florida was tied for the fourth-fastest state to return to pre-pandemic nonagricultural employment levels, achieving this milestone in October 2021. That’s well ahead of the U.S., which did not hit the same level until June 2022, according to Florida Chamber data.

“Today, Florida’s nonagricultural employment is 9.5% higher than pre-pandemic levels, far outpacing the national average of 4.6%,” Wilson notes. “Florida’s GDP, adjusted for inflation, has grown by an impressive 24.6% since pre-pandemic levels, compared to 13.6% for the U.S. overall.”

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, according to the Florida Chamber, the state saw business closures spike to 8.1% in Q2, reflecting the severe economic disruption. By the end of that year, recovery already was underway, with closure rates dropping to 6.3%.

Wilson said closure rates “have stabilized around pre-pandemic levels, with the most recent data from Q2 2024 showing a return to an average of 6.4%. These trends highlight Florida’s resilience and steady recovery — and, incredibly, Florida now leads the nation in new business startups.”

Asked what business leaders learned from the pandemic, Wilson said it taught the importance of adaptability, transparent communication and investing in technology to maintain operations and support employees.

“We also were reminded that a strong government that wants to keep the economy growing really matters. Developing diversified supply chains, robust risk management strategies and partnerships with public entities emerged as important lessons for resilience.”

What about SWFL?

Amir Neto, Ph.D., director of the Regional Economic Research Institute at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, said he thinks the SWFL economy has recovered; but it has changed.

“And in the meantime, we’ve had different natural disasters — [Hurricane] Ian (in September 2022), and more recently three hurricanes last season that have impacted a part of the region,” Neto says. “So that really makes it hard for us to understand and disentangle the different aspects of how the region has recovered from COVID-19.”

Neto said one indicator of recovery, even with the hurricanes thrown in, is increasing employment levels in SWFL. In February 2020 (pre-pandemic), the region had about 500,000 jobs; that number has increased by almost 10% over five years to 543,000.

He also pointed to the strength in taxable sales as a sign that the region has recovered and is showing growth.

“If we’re trying to look at growth, the real taxable sales [status] is a good proxy for our local GDP,” Neto says. “Right around the pandemic we were at about $2.8 billion in real taxable sales, and right now (December 2024) we are at about $2.9 billion. We have been trending down a little bit over the last year, but overall, we have seen this growth from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic pointing at a growing region.”

Neto said diversification of the population — with an influx of young families, along with more ethnic and racial diversity — was positive for the region’s economy. He also cited other industries besides hospitality, health care and education coming to the region, including Amazon in Lee County, Uline and Dialum in Collier County and FedEx in Charlotte County, as having helped diversify the economy and make it more resilient to downturns.

That growth, however, led to an increase in home prices due to increased demand and limited inventory, and Neto said he doesn’t see prices going back to their 2019, pre-pandemic levels. “We are going to see some slight correction, but we’re never going to see corrections back to the 2019 levels,” he says. “Even though we have supply coming online, it’s not at the same pace as demand.”

Health care systems focus on staffing

CEOs of Southwest Florida’s largest health care systems said that while COVID-19 cases occasionally spike at different times during any given year, the crisis footing they found themselves on at the height of the pandemic has definitely ended.

Paul Hiltz, CEO and president of nonprofit Naples Comprehensive Health, said the health care system is “fully back on track” after a couple of years of disruption, especially when it comes to staff turnover that was occurring during the pandemic.

“Our staff turnover has dropped dramatically,” Hiltz says. “We don’t have any agency nurses in here like we did during the pandemic, and our turnover’s better than the state and national average.”

Hiltz said the NCH system learned how to “craft a message and craft a culture in the middle of upheaval,” a subject he has written about in a book he co-authored with crisis communications expert Amanda Lucey titled Upheaval, recently published by Forbes. “We talk about better ways to communicate with the rank-and-file employees and what we can do for our community in terms of prevention and treatment,” he says.

From a business management standpoint, Hiltz said one of the things he would do differently in another crisis situation would be not to bring in as much temporary staffing.

“In the end, bringing in all these temporary employees we thought was helpful, but I don’t think it really was because it creates a ‘we-versus-they’ type of a thing between our own employees that have been here forever and brand-new people,” he explains. “We would try to look at staffing differently; we really have gotten much better at learning how to predict staffing needs and how to staff these units.”

For Scott Lowe, market CEO of the for-profit Physicians Regional Healthcare System, one of the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic also was about staffing and the workforce, which gives him pause when he thinks about potential future public health crises.

“Certainly, it impacted the workforce, as well, because I think a lot of people changed their tune on whether they wanted to be in this industry anymore with the stress associated with it,” Lowe says. “And I think that is certainly going to be a fear that, if we were to have another pandemic, we may have — and I don’t want to say we had a mass exodus — but there were certainly a lot of [medical] folks that decided on an early retirement because … there’s just too much risk. So, I think that is certainly a concern that I would have going forward if we were to have another COVID-like pandemic.”

Lowe said he thinks the regional health care systems during the COVID-19 crisis learned the importance of working together, lessons that could be helpful in case of another pandemic.

“The challenge there is you just don’t know what it’s going to be, and what the clinical conditions are going to present as, or how we’re going to be able to treat it or what the impact is on each individual patient,” Lowe says. “And I think that’s just part of the challenge. What we did learn is that we can all work together and find those solutions and continue to foster that engagement. I know during the pandemic we all, including NCH and Lee Health, worked together when we were short on personal protective equipment, and we were running out of oxygen or whatever it may be — there were avenues to say, ‘Let’s help each other out for the good of the community.’”

Larry Antonucci, M.D., CEO and president of nonprofit Lee Health in Fort Myers, said the health care system is “in a better place” following a pre- and post-pandemic nursing shortage.

“There was a nursing shortage before the pandemic, and it certainly got worse during and after the pandemic,” he says. “But now we’ve been doing a lot of work with our local universities, with internships, with funding scholarships.”

As a physician, from a clinical standpoint, Antonucci said he thinks one of the challenges Florida faces going forward is vaccine adherence, with vaccination rates in the state lower for not only COVID-19, but RSV and flu. “And I think that’s a challenge, and that’s just a reflection of the public’s lack of confidence in recommendations that they received. During the heat of battle, things can go wrong,” he says, “and people can make misjudgments or make assumptions that maybe are not true.

“But the fact of the matter is we know that vaccinations save lives, especially flu vaccinations. And we’re certainly encouraging that. The concern, of course, is: What’s the next pandemic going to look like? I think if you speak to any infectious disease experts, they will tell you that there will be others. We just hope they are not going to be severe. But as a system, we will be ready for it.”

Public health workforce funding seen as critical

Epidemiologist Jayanta Gupta, associate professor in the Department of Health Sciences and director of the public health program at FGCU, said that in an age of international travel it is important to be vigilant about the possibility of new infections or new pathogens that can spread rapidly, as COVID-19 did.

And when it comes to preparing for possible future pandemics, Gupta said he sees increased funding for the public health workforce as critical, especially for epidemiologists, physicians and nurses.

“Wherever we have a shortfall to deal with such public health emergencies, we need steps to see that those positions are filled so that when an emergency happens, we have sufficient staff — for contact tracing, first of all, because that is a critical step in mitigating the state of infection, and of course for health care delivery.”

COVID and hurricanes: Paradise Coast tourism comes back from one-two punch

Just as Southwest Florida’s usually vibrant tourism industry was recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, it got walloped by major hurricanes, including Ian in 2022 and Milton in 2024.

Jay Tusa, tourism director at Naples, Marco Island, Everglades Convention and Visitors Bureau, said “the destination” — as tourism professionals call the city or region they represent — has fully recovered from the effects of the pandemic.

“Obviously, in that five-year period, we’ve had some other setbacks, mainly storms,” Tusa says. “So, all in all, I would say 100% recovery from COVID-19, and even with the storms, especially Ian, I think we’ve recovered from that. But you always have this ebb and flow when you have these types of situations, obviously with the pandemic and then environmental factors such as storms.”

Tusa said that recent additional funding of $5.45 million from the Collier Board of County Commissioners and the Tourism Development Council will help build outreach to existing and new markets in an effort to combat what he referred to as “Florida fatigue.”

“Everybody had so much pent-up demand after COVID-19 that tourism destinations, especially beaches, were just booming and doing really well,” Tusa says. “Then, after a couple of years, Florida started to see a little bit of ‘Florida fatigue’ when people could start going elsewhere for vacation trips. After not being able to travel abroad or to the Caribbean, when those opened up and people were able to take cruises, that started siphoning off some of our visitors.”

Tusa said he hopes the additional funding for advertising will be able to make an impact in the destination for visitors coming to the area. Target markets include the Midwest — Chicago, Cleveland and Minneapolis, which is a new market for the CVB. In the Northeast, the CVB last year added Hartford, Connecticut, to existing markets of Boston and New York City.

‘It’s been a roller coaster’

Jay Richter, managing broker with John R. Wood Properties in Fort Myers, has been a Realtor in the Southwest Florida market for 30 years, and he said the years since the pandemic have seen more ups and downs than any period he’s seen since the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008.

“It’s been a roller coaster,” Richter says. “To give a perspective, from June of 2020 to June of 2022, during those two years the [real estate] market went up 65%. In valuations, if you look at a one-week summary of the [home] sales in all of Southwest Florida, there were a thousand more pending than there were new listings.

“The pandemic created just a huge interest in real estate. The interest rates were low. People could shelter in place, and they wanted to be outside; they wanted to be in Florida. They liked what was happening in Florida and they came from states that we’ve never had people come from before, like California, and even a lot from New Jersey and New York. It was remarkable.”

Fast forward to January 2025, Richter said, when a seven-day report for all of Southwest Florida showed 1,000 more new listings than there were pending sales.

Richter said the SWFL housing market is on the “downward cycle” of prices, which makes it “really good” for buyers but tough for sellers, who he said will have to adjust their pricing and “win the beauty contest.”

Richter said he thinks prices will continue to go down because the prices seen during the pandemic were “not sustainable.”

He said he thinks people — especially older people who are “tired of the cold” — will keep moving to the region “because of what you see and feel when you go out your door. They come back for the sunshine, and our area has palm trees … We’re in the tropics.

“So, as the prices keep going down, the same cycle will start all over again,” he says. “Everybody will be buying everything.”

When working remotely becomes permanent

After many years on the New York City arts and culture scene, Elysia Dawn knew during the COVID-19 pandemic that Naples was calling her home, and like a large percentage of Americans, she made the switch to working virtually.

And while many employees across industries are now being required to return to the office — including within the federal government — Dawn is an example of someone who has made the change a permanent one.

Dawn, who grew up in Naples and returned in 2021 to work remotely in her arts consulting business during the pandemic, has served as executive director of United Arts Collier since November 2022, and was named CEO on Jan. 10. She left Naples at age 14 to pursue a career in professional ballet, training in North Carolina and at the Miami City Ballet School before dancing professionally in Washington, D.C., Boston and New York, and touring internationally.

After a decade of professional ballet, including performing with Mikhail Baryshnikov, she was sidelined by an injury and decided to pursue an undergraduate degree at Columbia University, majoring in art history and business management. She ultimately went to work for The Frick Collection and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art; she also received a master’s degree from Columbia in nonprofit management.

When the pandemic hit, she had just left the Met to start her own consulting business working with performing artists and arts nonprofits, which allowed her to work remotely and not be completely tied to New York.

“I did a year of traveling back and forth before landing in this role [at UAC],” Dawn says. “What brought me back [to Naples] was really the pandemic time. My parents had been here the whole time, and my brother and his wife and my niece are all up in Gainesville. I was just missing everybody terribly, and New York had changed a lot; I wanted to find a way back here.”

After a year of remote consulting work, when the opportunity arose to lead United Arts Collier — then known as United Arts Council of Collier County — in fall 2022, Dawn said she was thrilled to find this kind of opportunity in her hometown.

But that opportunity arrived bookended by another challenge: Southwest Florida had just been hit hard by Hurricane Ian, and the UAC offices in Naples had been flooded and rendered unusable.

“There was a really difficult decision when I came on board that we had to make: Do we invest what was going to be an exorbitant amount of money to renovate and continue the overhead costs, or invest it in the staff and come up with creative ways to share the work of our artists?” Dawn says. “I was doing a strategic assessment of the organization and looking at everything we were doing from both a mission and a monetary perspective, and, for me, the monetary perspective on that [renovation] was unjustifiable and the mission part of it was important.”

Dawn said part of the decision about whether to keep the former physical office location was informed by lessons learned during the pandemic about how effective working virtually could be. She shared the idea with the UAC Board and her team, and the decision was made to “find the way forward” without a physical office.

“There were some benefits: What we weren’t spending on overhead was really invested in the team and in our education programs,” Dawn says. “It was also part of our mission to be serving all of Collier County that we needed to be in multiple places at once, really. So, we’re working remotely administratively, but in the community, we have exhibition locations and event locations all spread out.”