THANK YOU!
All working now and recovered. It did seem the issue with the phpmyadmin manual upgrade script was due to that firewall issue. Once I ran the commands you provided, apt update and upgrade resumed working properly. I then was able to successfully run the phpmyadmin script and it successfully downloaded the file and upgrade phpmyadmin.
I also rebooted the server to make sure things remained intact and I was able to run update and upgrade again with no problem.
Thanks for the quick response and help. I was worried I was going to have to do a restore from a DigitalOcean backup. Thanks for saving me the time!
For anyone else that ends up on this thread. The commands eris provided me with to restore the firewall issue and connectivity, can be found here: