Politicizing covid in Florida
South Florida Sun Sentinel
Last week started with Christina Pushaw, press secretary to Gov. Ron DeSantis, maintaining that Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried had lied when she said the number of covid-positive Floridians was the worst it had ever been.
Those numbers — put out by the Florida Hospital Association — showed that Florida this week broke records for both the highest number of cases and the highest number of hospitalizations.
Pushaw maintained that numbers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed more than 11,000 hospitalizations for covid in July 2020, slightly more than the 10,000-plus who were hospitalized with the disease when Fried made her statement on Aug. 1.
Parsing over data in a desperate attempt to polish DeSantis’ performance during the latest covid surge is all part of the job for the governor’s press secretary. But it’s a moot argument over semantics and sources now as Florida had reached nearly 13,000 hospitalizations by midday Thursday.
DeSantis and Pushaw, who serves more as a Twitter attack dog than a traditional press secretary, continue to downplay just how sorry a state we’re in here in Florida.
At 60 hospitalizations per 100,000 residents, Florida now leads the nation in hospitalizations. We are third in ICU beds filled. Second in daily new cases reported. Eighth in total cases.
“They are definitely at record levels in the Orlando area, and the numbers in North Florida are really high,” Justin Senior, CEO of the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board. “It’s younger, unvaccinated adults that are really making up the bulk of this. That’s 96% of what we’re seeing, and a large chunk of that other 4% are transplant patients or cancer patients.”
A large portion of unvaccinated Floridians are age 12 and younger, and thankfully, even with all the variants floating around, serious covid complications remain vanishingly rare among our children. But they can catch the disease, transmit it to others and infect relatives who may be immunocompromised, such as those transplant and cancer patients Senior mentioned.
That makes mask wearing in schools a necessity until kids can get vaccinated.
DeSantis’ determination to stop mask mandates in schools is a death trap. He calls such mandates “unscientific” because children do not generally come down with serious cases of covid. But he foolishly stops there instead of connecting the dots of infection to everyone else.
As the Centers for Disease Control has noted, “Children and adolescents can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick with covid-19, and can spread the virus to others.”
That is why the CDC recommends masks for schools in the fall and it’s why DeSantis standing in the way of mask mandates now is a violation of his most basic duty as the elected leader of our state: to protect our lives, health and safety.
To his credit, DeSantis has not joined the chorus of mostly right-wing crackpots who have not only refused to get vaccinated but have told others to do the same. But he should do more to encourage vaccination among younger populations instead of patting himself on the back about vaccination rates among Florida’s elderly population.
On Wednesday, DeSantis held a roundtable on the latest spike in covid cases in Florida. Joining him were Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Simone Marstiller, Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry, Tampa General CEO John Couris, Jackson Health System CEO Carlos Migoya, North Broward Hospital District CEO Shane Strum, UF Health Shands CEO Ed Jimenez, Orlando Health CEO David Strong and Orlando Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. George Ralls.
He spent the first 15 minutes of the call repeatedly asking various forms of the same question: Was my decision to concentrate the push for vaccinations on the elderly the right call?
Time and again, medical experts said, yes, it was great that there were so few elderly in the hospital now and that healthier, younger patients being hospitalized meant fewer deaths, but that the important point was that more than 95% of hospitalized covid patients are unvaccinated.
This should be the important point for DeSantis as well — not what happened last year, or the decisions he made when vaccines first became available; not vainglorious attempts at self-congratulation, but what’s happening on the ground right now across the state.
Senior agreed with the experts at DeSantis’ roundtable that there would be far fewer deaths in this spike — what he gently called “negative outcomes” — though he based that not only on the age of patients, but on the availability of treatments such as monoclonal antibodies that were not widely available last year.
After the covid roundtable, DeSantis called a press conference to attack President Biden over his criticism of DeSantis’ refusal to back mask mandates, or at the very least “get out of the way” and let school boards decide for themselves.
“If you’re coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I am standing in your way,” DeSantis said.
Time and again, the governor bizarrely equates public health measures with affronts to liberty, promotes vaccination only in as much as it promotes his own self-image, and attacks anyone who disagrees. His ego and ambition have made Florida sicker.