Florida opens restaurants, won’t require wearing mask

ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. – Gov. Ron Desantis of Florida announced this past weekend that the state is moving into the next phase of reopening, and will lift restrictions for restaurants and other businesses despite the continued spread of the coronavirus.

Desantis, a Republican and avid supporter of President Donald Trump who spoke at the president’s rally in Jacksonville last Thursday, signed the order this past Friday, immediately allowing restaurants and many other businesses to operate at full capacity as part of Phase 3 of his administration’s reopening plan.

“We’re not closing anything going forward,” the governor said at a news conference in St. Petersburg.

County governments in Florida will be allowed to limit capacity but not by more than 50 percent, Desantis said — a new restriction on local control.

“I think this will be very, very important to the industry,” Desantis said, calling the wholesale shuttering of restaurants in particular to be unacceptable. “You can’t say no after six months and just have people twisting in the wind.”

Desantis also is refusing to mandate mask usage in the state, insisting that such a decision should be left up to local governments. Yet his administration has increasingly stepped in to prevent counties from imposing more stringent virus restrictions. Many of Florida’s largest counties are run by Democrats.

Meanwhile, Florida now has more than 700,000 confirmed infections of the coronavirus, according to statistics released by the state Department of Health Sunday.

In a released statement, the state’s Democratic Party chair, Terrie Rizzo, took issue with Desantis restricting local governments from “taking evidence-based measures to protect their communities.”

“We all desperately want things to return back to normal, but that can’t happen when Desantis and Trump have no plan to get us out of this public health crisis,” she said.

Under the state’s reopening plan, Phase 3 allows for bars and nightclubs to operate at full capacity “with limited social distancing protocols.” It was unclear immediately how the order would affect Miami-dade County, the county hardest-hit by the virus, which has kept bars and nightclubs closed since March. The county’s mayor had said he hoped to allow for some operation with restrictions such as table service only; the governor’s order prohibits the closure of any business.

The order also appeared to render largely toothless other local restrictions, such as mask mandates and curfews, by suspending the collection of individual fines and other penalties imposed for violating virus-related restrictions.

Cases are down significantly in the state after a big surge over the summer. The governor has touted the fact that Florida was able to come down from the spike without imposing a lockdown as evidence that shutting down businesses should not be contemplated to try to contain the virus in the future. Jason Mahon, a spokesman for Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, which operates state-run testing sites, says the sites have plenty of capacity but fewer people are coming to get tested. Testing is also conducted at municipal, federal and private sites.

If a county wants to restrict restaurant capacity between 50 and 100 percent, Desantis said, it will need to provide justification to the state.

“The idea that government dictating this is better than them making decisions so that their customers have confidence, I think, is misplaced,” he said.

In other news concerning the pandemic:

Madrid

An association of families of coronavirus victims has planted what it says are 53,000 small Spanish flags in a Madrid park to honor the dead of the pandemic.

Volunteers placed the flags on a grassy slope overlooking a highway in the capital early Sunday.

COVID-19 has claimed a confirmed 31,232 lives in Spain. But difficulties in testing at the start of the crisis mean many more victims likely have gone unrecorded.

“I think it is a beautiful homage to the victims, a lot better than the homage that was given by the prime minister,” 62-year-old retiree Honorio Hernandez said. “I have been in the Arlington National Cemetery and this reminds me of that. These people at the very least deserve this, if not much more.”

Elsewhere in Madrid, over 1,000 protesters rallied to demand a more vigorous response to the growing second wave of the coronavirus.

Madrid has become the epicenter of the rebound of the virus in Spain, once again the worst hit country in Europe. Spain has 319 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over 14 days. France has 229 cases per 100,000, the United Kingdom 96.

Paris

Hospitals in the Paris and Marseille regions are delaying some scheduled operations to free up space for COVID-19 patients as the French government tries to stem a rising tide of infections, the health minister said Sunday.

As restaurants and bars in Marseille prepared Sunday to close for a week as part of scattered new virus restrictions, Health Minister Olivier Veran insisted that the country plans no fresh lockdowns.

Two Nobel Prize-winning economists proposed in Le Monde newspaper this weekend that France lock down its population for the first three weeks of December to allow families to get together safely for the end-of-year holidays and “save Christmas.”

In response, Veran said on LCI television, “We do not want to confine the country again. Several countries around us made other choices. We don’t want this.”

French health authorities reported 14,000 new infections Saturday amid a mass testing effort. France has reported 31,700 virus-related deaths, the third-highest toll in Europe after Britain and Italy.

London

Prince Charles has warned that up to 1 million young people may need “urgent help’’ to protect their futures from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the Prince of Wales said there has “never been a time as uniquely challenging as the present” and that it is a particularly hard time to be young.

He said the crisis is reminiscent of the upheavals of the 1970s, when youth unemployment was one of the pressing issues facing British society.

He says, “the task ahead is unquestionably vast, but it is not insurmountable.”

Charles’ comments come as university students — many of whom have only just arrived on campuses after the summer break — are facing increased restrictions amid COVID-19 outbreaks in residence halls.

In Manchester, students are chafing at a lockdown they say was imposed without warning. One group taped “HMP MMU” to a window, suggesting the dormitory had become Her Majesty’s Prison at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.