South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
DeSantis boasts he handled pandemic right. But is it true?
When Gov. Ron DeSantis looks back at 2020, he sees a job well done.
The Republican governor is holding up Florida as a model of how to best handle COVID19, even though many of the nation’s leading public health experts denounced his libertarian approach to the virus.
A year into the pandemic, Florida’s COVID-19 death rate is just below the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, the state’s jobless rate is better than other big states, including New York and California.
In his annual state-of-the-state address, DeSantis said he lifted restrictions on businesses and got children back in the classroom faster than other governors, while protecting the most vulnerable from the viru s.
Democrats responded that DeSantis’ failures — from muzzling public health leaders to passing on a statewide mask mandate — cost lives.
Here is how Florida and DeSantis have performed on some key indicators.
COVID-19 deaths
In the pandemic’s earliest days, it appeared Florida, a state with a large elderly population, would be one of the hardest-hit places in the country.
By any account, Florida has suffered immensely with more than 32,000 COVID-19 deaths, nearly 2 million cases and over
82,000 hospitalizations. COVID19 is on track to be the leading cause of death over a one-year span in Miami-Dade County, surpassing heart disease and cancer, said Mary Jo Trepka, a public health researcher at Florida International University.
But despite its open-forbusiness mindset, Florida’s death rate is no worse than the national average and better than several states that imposed tighter restrictions and mask mandates, according to CDC data. Florida ranks No. 27 among the
50 states with 150 deaths per 100,000 people, which is lower than the national average of 160 deaths per
100,000 people. A connection between DeSantis’ policy choices and Florida’s middle-ofthe-pack death rate, though, isn’t clear cut.
Turning COVID-19 deaths into a Red State versus Blue State showdown is problematic because it ignores countless variables that could lead to more deaths — from population density to obesity rates, Trepka said.
“It is very difficult to compare the states because we experienced different epidemics,” Trepka said.
The virus hit hard early in New York City — the most densely populated place in the United States — before therapeutic drugs had been developed, which contributed to high death rates in the Northeast, Trepka said.
Florida’s warm weather allowed for year-round outdoor gatherings, which are less likely to spread the virus. Researchers are still trying to understand how weather affects the virus, but some studies suggest humidity could reduce transmission rates.
DeSantis ordered a statewide shutdown early in the pandemic. Florida’s biggest cities, including South Florida’s urban centers, went even further than DeSantis’ response and issued mask mandates and stricter public health restrictions than the state.
DeSantis is correct in saying Florida’s death rate is lower than Blue states that had tighter restrictions, including New York, Illinois, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. But he is also ignoring Republican-led states with few COVID-19 restrictions and higher death rates, such as South Dakota, Iowa and Tennessee.
California, a state with tight restrictions and a mask mandate, has a lower death rate than Florida, although that gap has narrowed, as explored by the Los Angeles Times.
The United States as a whole has been one of the hardest-hit countries in the world with more than
538,000 deaths, and the politicization of masks and other public health guidance is part of the reason why, said Edwin Michael, a public health researcher at the University of South Florida.
“Messaging is very important,” he said. “If the messaging was right from the beginning, we could have halted this.”
A CDC study released this month showed an association between mask mandates and lower
COVID-19 deaths.
Through much of the pandemic, DeSantis flouted CDC guidance and muzzled the state’s public health leaders. He high-fived cheering and unmasked MAGA fans at a Donald Trump rally, opened the Governor’s Mansion for holiday parties and sidelined the state’s surgeon general and top health leader, Dr. Scott Rivkees.
On Thursday, DeSantis again brought in Trump’s former favored COVID adviser Dr. Scott Atlas and other handpicked scientists who backed his approach. During a panel discussion, they questioned the effectiveness of masks, lockdowns and contact tracing. Rivkees did not have a seat on the panel.
Washington state, which faced the nation’s first widespread COVID outbreak, has been cited as an example of a state that used strong and unified public health messaging to contain the virus. Its death rate is toward the bottom of states.
Florida would have avoided roughly 17,800 deaths if it had managed to hold its death rate down to Washington state’s rate, according to CDC and census data.
The economy
DeSantis has also boasted that Florida is doing much better economically than other states because it didn’t saddle businesses with excessive restrictions.
Looking at unemployment, Florida’s rate was below the national average in January. It had a lower unemployment rate than California, New York and Texas.
That’s surprising given the role that tourism plays in Florida’s economy, said William Luther, an economist at Florida Atlantic University.
“A year ago, if you were to look at all 50 states, you would expect Florida to be especially hard hit by the pandemic,” Luther said. “The fact Florida doesn’t seem to be doing worse than other states suggests that it has performed exceptionally.”
Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida, said he thinks Florida’s approach limited the pandemic’s economic damage.
“We didn’t cause the economic devastation that some of these other states did via long-term stay-athome orders and shutdowns,” he said. “I think we’d be hard-pressed to find another state that handled it better than Florida. It would be much easier to find a state that handled it worse.”
Disney World reopened with limited capacity in July. In California, theme parks are still shuttered under state guidelines with a target date of April 1 for Disneyland’s reopening with strict capacity limits.
If Florida had charted a similar course as California, the state’s economy would be in much worse shape, Snaith said.
Approval rating
DeSantis’ political stock is on the rise, and he’s emerged as a possible contender for president in 2024. When a straw poll was taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month in Orlando, DeSantis finished as the top choice if Trump doesn’t run, beating other rising GOP politicians.
A Mason-Dixon poll released earlier this month showed DeSantis’ approval rating is on the rebound, going from 45% in July to
53%, an 8-point increase. While DeSantis is still down from his pre-pandemic approval rating of
62%, the poll showed him beating possible Democratic contenders Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist in 2022.
DeSantis has been embroiled in a controversy over whether he played politics with Florida’s vaccine distribution, but his backing among Republicans in Tallahassee is unshaken.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is mired in a sexual harassment scandal and is accused of hiding the true death toll in nursing homes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a potential recall election.
DeSantis has been seeing more favorable headlines in the national press lately.
The New York Times proclaimed, “DeSantis Is Ascendant and Cuomo Is Faltering,” while the Wall Street Journal headlined a column “Vindication for Ron DeSantis.”
DeSantis blasted out his own headline recently in an email sent out supporters — “The Free State of Florida.”
It’s a slogan he is banking will be a winner in 2022.