How Florida got itself sick
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Millions of our fellow Americans are rushing headlong into the same deadly coronavirus trap that caused tens of thousands of deaths in New York in a matter of weeks. Florida’s top officials have refused to learn from re- cent history — including their own mistakes — and now seem doomed to repeat it.
“You have seen the increase in positivity, but there are a lot of parts of Florida that are still in the single digits,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said, defensively, at a meandering press conference this week.
He was trying to put the best spin on the state’s disastrous explosion of COVID-19 cases, which have set new records almost daily. As of this writing, 234,238 Floridians have the virus, with more than 10,000 new cases added every 24 hours. Approximately 4,000 have perished so far.
The state hospital system is feeling the strain: official numbers show that fewer than 15% of the state’s 5,315 intensive care unit beds are currently available — only 921 in a state of 21 million people. Twenty-five out of Florida’s 67 counties have at least one hospital with no open ICU beds.
It didn’t have to be this way. The DeSantis debacle is a cautionary tale of what happens when politicians choose politics over public health best practices.
The scientists have warned repeatedly that the virus spreads exponentially, but few of us non-mathematicians instinctively grasp how quickly numbers get very big when one person each infects a few others and then those few each infect a few more, who infect a few more and so on. Pretty soon, the numbers are in the millions.
The growth of COVID-19 isn’t that swift, but because every infected person can infect multiple additional people, public health officials knew by midMarch that the rate of spread would be explosive. They counseled social distancing and restrictions on venues like beaches, taverns and houses of worship where people congregate.
DeSantis would have none of it, and famously refused to close beach communities during Spring Break in March. As late as May 20, DeSantis publicly dismissed his critics.
“None of these people knew anything about Florida at all, so I didn’t care what they were saying,” he told the conservative columnist Rich Lowry.
Around the same time, the Florida Department of Health fired a 30-yearold data specialist, Rebekah Jones, when she resisted pressure to present COVID-19 data on the state’s public website in a way she said undercounted the number of cases.
DeSantis has refused to issue a statewide order mandating the use of masks. In Jacksonville, entering retail and service establishments remains a crapshoot: The proprietor and guests might be wearing masks, but there’s an excellent chance they won’t.
DeSantis is now restricting establishments to 50% of capacity — but allowing each individual county to make its own rules about requirements like masking.
“It’s not an even epidemic through the state,” DeSantis said recently. “There is a lot of diversity here. Obviously
the solutions are going to be tailored differently based on the facts at hand.”
The lack of clear direction has caused confusion. “I think we’re disjointed in terms of the messages coming from different parts of our government,” said Broward County Mayor Dale Holness. “That’s sad; we ought to be fully coordinated.”
Even as cases shoot upward, the state has ordered all public schools to reopen their campuses next month.
Such recklessness is taking its toll. The political prize DeSantis so eagerly sought — the plan to have President Trump deliver the Republican renomination speech in Jacksonville next month — may escape the governor’s grasp.
“When we signed a few weeks ago, it looked good and now all of a sudden it’s spiking up a little bit and that’s going to go down — it really depends on the timing,” Trump said in a recent interview.
Meaning even the nation’s biggest COVID denier knows a problem when he sees it.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.