Florida’s tragic COVID milestone: 50K deaths
Fifty-thousand people dead in Florida from COVID.
It’s as if the entire population of Apopka had been wiped out.
It’s as if almost 100 people across the state were getting killed in traffic accidents every single day since March 2020.
It’s as if we had nearly the same daily casualty count of the Surfside condo collapse, or a 9/11 event every month.
Fifty-thousand is nearly 10 times the combined number of Floridians who died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
At a news conference Thursday about antibody treatments for COVID, Gov. Ron DeSantis was mum on the state’s bodycount milestone until asked about it by a reporter.
“It’s been a really tough year and a half,” DeSantis said.
No kidding, governor.
He offered no words of comfort for the 50,000 families who have lost loved ones. No self-reflection on what he, as the state’s chief executive during the entire pandemic, might have done differently. No official events to mark the shared tragedy.
Instead of taking any responsibility, the governor tried to take credit for the recent reduction in Florida’s historic and horrific COVID hospitalization rate.
It’s certainly true that some of the decline in hospitalizations is due to the governor’s recent push to make antibody treatments available to people who contract COVID. He’s right to push for early treatment before people become too ill. But he has no way of knowing how many of those people who got treated would have ended up in the hospital and how many would not.
The more likely answer to dropping hospitalizations is the state’s recent decline in positive cases — down 41% in the last 14 days from record-setting highs — which has nothing to do with antibody treatments.
The COVID pandemic obviously isn’t the governor’s fault. But he does bear blame for giving up on aggressive vaccine promotion after his initial springtime push to have seniors vaccinated. And he does bear the blame for contributing to an atmosphere of hostility toward masks and social distancing by acting as if everything was back to normal.
It’s not.
There’s nothing normal about still having more than 9,000 people hospitalized for COVID.
And there is nothing normal about a state COVID death toll that’s now averaging 362 victims per day over the last week, easily the highest mortality rate of any state in the nation.
Florida used to be able to point to a relatively low overall death rate since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. We’re now tied with two other states for having the 10th highest, thanks to a summer surge that made Florida ground zero for death and suffering.
The way things are going, Florida’s likely to surpass New York’s total death count of more than 54,000, a number that was inflated in the earliest days of the pandemic due to a combination of little information about the disease and grievous errors by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
What’s Florida’s excuse for this summer’s surge?
We know far more about the disease, treatment and testing have improved, and we have a widely available and free vaccine that’s proven to keep the vast majority of people out of the hospital and alive.
Florida’s summer surge wasn’t inevitable, as DeSantis keeps implying. It’s the result of a lack of leadership, mostly on the state level, and a significant segment of the population that insists on behaving irresponsibly, either out of stubbornness, politics, ignorance or gullibility.
Some people, for example, actually believe that the vaccine changes a person’s RNA, which is part of the genetic process. One of those people, standing right next to the governor, said so at a news conference earlier this week. Another speaker, also standing right next to the governor, implied the vaccine could kill her.
DeSantis had nothing to say in response. No gentle correction of dangerous misinformation. No setting the record straight. Just silence.
We’ve had enough silence in this state. We need to speak up, collectively, to get this pandemic under control.
We owe it to the 50,000 dead.