Floridians fight for masks
On Wednesday, when Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, encouraged Floridians on Twitter to dust off their disaster plans in case Tropical Storm Fred swerved our way, I had to laugh. Isn’t disaster already upon us? And what exactly is the governor’s plan as the state drowns in coronavirus?
Obstruction may be a political ploy, but it isn’t a strategy to thwart the state’s own record-shattering number of covid infections.
The last thing my home state needs now is a governor who stokes the worst in Florida, a place that notoriously attracts and revels in its outliers, scoundrels, fugitives, scammers and chronic rule breakers. The vibe here is often rebellion or indifference, regardless of political party. We don’t need to ratchet people up to fight. We need to urge them to listen to reason.
But here we are. DeSantis quibbles over pandemic numbers instead of trying to bring them down, and extols a perverse kind of freedom that comes with no shared responsibility.
Meanwhile, most schools are reopening across the state this week, filling up with children 12 and under who can’t be vaccinated, and many older children who won’t be vaccinated thanks to their parents’, or their own, refusal. School districts are already reporting covid cases, which means more disruption and more illness.
What’s the governor’s big move in addressing this? Making it harder to protect children and staff by bigfooting local officials and throwing up barriers to universal masking. He is standing unflinchingly behind his July 30 executive order allowing parents, not school officials or science, to decide whether children should wear masks at school. Further driving home his priorities, DeSantis will allow children to switch to another school — even to a private school, using an emergency voucher — should they feel “harassed” for going maskless.
There is little sign that he will back down, despite a letter on Thursday signed by more than 800 Florida physicians pleading with DeSantis to change his mind given the threat of the ultra-contagious delta variant. The fewer children who wear masks, the less effective masks are generally.
“We can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state and I can tell you, Florida, we’re a free state,” DeSantis said at an Aug. 4 news conference.
This week, Broward County joined another school district in rebellion. Broward’s school board, based in Fort Lauderdale, voted to require masks except for long-standing medical or educational exemptions. This despite DeSantis’s threats to dock the pay of superintendents and school board members who disobey his mask order. On Thursday, DeSantis acknowledged that he doesn’t actually have the power to withhold their pay.
The covid disaster is only getting worse. Patients in St. Petersburg must wait inside parked ambulances for an hour because they can’t be promptly processed. Nurses, exhausted once again, grow scarcer. The state has the highest rate of pediatric covid-related hospitalizations, keeps breaking its own infection and hospitalization numbers, and, as of Thursday, made up nearly 19 percent of all new infections in the country.
DeSantis has stuck with his political playbook, blaming media “hysteria” - not the delta variant - for the crisis. He opposes requiring the vaccination of health-care workers because unlimited personal freedom is more important than freedom from harm. And his stance has paid off, with loads of campaign cash as he travels the country giving speeches, fundraising and touting his anti-Fauci sweatshirts.
The delta variant may well fizzle out before DeSantis decides to wholeheartedly tackle this wave of coronavirus. Biding his time might appear to be his only strategy. The good news is fear is driving up vaccination rates and people continue to fight back, including school boards and parents. DeSantis’s anti-mask mandate is now in the courts after outraged parents decided to sue. Judi Hayes, whose child is disabled, is one of them.
“I’ve lived in Florida practically my entire life and I never envisioned that I would be in this position, that the governor would actively be trying to harm my child,” Hayes told CNN this week. “Epidemiology doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t care about your freedom. It doesn’t care about your feelings.”