It is interesting to note that the virus spreads widely when people go indoors. Most the country goes indoors in colder months. Residents in Florida tend to go indoors starting in June/July when it gets hot (as noted by researchers). For Florida this makes summer the peak season for COVID similar to other warmer countries with widespread A/C. Of course Florida has the advantages of more humidity and sunshine which tends to reduce COVID spread -- yet Florida needs to be prepared for an uptick in summer. At this point it is a race between vaccinations and stopping the spread of COVID variants -- and Florida is not doing well in either.
I think you're certainly on to something with the virus acting up indoors and the disparity between Florida and other states, but some of us were on to this last July when the rest of you were telling us we were all going to die in Florida.
Florida's numbers are far, far worse at every point. It's as if you are proud of all that killing you were doing, and want to relive it. If that's your "treasure trove of fun" well congrats on how effective you were at killing your own citizens. Overall, you are getting infected at 4 times the rate of Canada and people are dying at almost 3 times the rate. And as proud as you are that somehow half the states are supposedly doing worse, the evidence suggests Florida is undercounting all these numbers. And you are still doing far, far worse then Canada even in recent weeks. It's like you want to kill off as many as you can before the vaccines and medical advances save you from yourself. It is what it is but you have to be god awful stupid to be this proud of Florida's Covid experience. This is epic "Trump like" stupidity. And it's disrespectful of the medical community that put their life on the line fighting this deadly disease, and it's many victims.
Florida made Covid a nice home throughout. You literally can't even fit Florida's numbers on that chart.
N. Korea also claims low COVID numbers https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politi...s-florida-covid-19-data-whistleblower-arrest/ But now, a top state official was telling her to change the test positivity rate of certain counties to align with the state’s maximum threshold for reopening, according to Jones. (Requests for comment from Shamarial Roberson, Florida’s deputy secretary for health, went unanswered, but she previously told the Tampa Bay Times, “It is patently false to say that the Department of Health has manipulated any data.”) “There were counties that had, like, 18 or 20 percent positivity,” Jones recalls. “And she was like, ‘Well, just change it to 10.’” Up until that moment, Jones had had plenty of concerns with how Florida was handling the pandemic, but she considered them outside of her purview—matters of policy, not data (for example, the decision to exempt rural counties from more stringent reopening criteria).This was the first time she’d been asked to outright lie. At first, she says, she laughed out loud: “I thought it was a joke.” But the official didn’t back down, she says. “She just stared, dead-eyed,” recalls Jones. “She said, ‘I once had a data person who told me, You tell me what you want the numbers to show and I’ll make it happen.’” After that, says Jones, “I made it very clear I was not comfortable.” On May 18, Jones was fired from her job. An official statement from the Florida DOH said it was for “insubordination” and that Jones had modified the dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors. But she tells a different story: “I was fired for refusing to manipulate data to drum up support for the governor’s plan to reopen.” The Friday before, she’d asked her boss how to submit an anonymous whistleblower complaint raising alarm about the state’s lies, she says. Her termination took place Monday morning before she got the chance. Instead, she fought back privately, letting an email list of people who received her updates know that she was no longer maintaining the state’s dashboard and suggesting they be “diligent” in how they used the data from now on, according to Jones. When state lawmakers called for an investigation into her firing, she refused media requests, preferring to stay out of the public eye. It was DeSantis who brought the fight to her doorstep—figuratively, then literally. Thus began a long, strange saga that would end with her sweating and shivering in the mental isolation room of a Tallahassee jail, delirious with COVID-19, the very disease she’d become famous for trying to inform the public about. It all started during a May press conference, when DeSantis was asked about Jones being removed from the Florida DOH. He called her termination a “nonissue.” Then, on May 20, DeSantis went further, denying that Jones had built the prized dashboard in the first place during an appearance with former Vice President Pence. He called her credentials into question, suggesting she wasn’t really a scientist. As Jones recently put it on Twitter, he “decided to launch me into the news cycle, defame me, and attempt to strip all of my hard work and experience from me.” (When reached for comment, the governor’s office referred Cosmo to a tweet by Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez calling Jones “a failed state employee” and a link to an article about Jones on a self-described “MAGAzine” that also published stories about election conspiracy theories.) Finally, and most explosively, he alleged she was under “active criminal charges in the state of Florida” for something entirely unrelated to data or the pandemic—for “cyberstalking and cyber sexual harassment.” (Partly accurate, but we’ll get to that.) This time, Jones did not fight back privately. On May 22, she appeared on Chris Cuomo’s show on CNN from her bedroom, incisively and confidently laying out how she’d been asked to manipulate data for the state. It was a devastating (for DeSantis, at least) performance. After defending herself, “I naively believed I could just go back to being a private person,” she says. “They’re not listening to the scientists,” Jones told The Guardian in August. “They’re just going to let everybody fend for themselves.” On Twitter, she also began pointing out issues she saw with Florida’s data since she had no longer been managing it, including what she claims were 76 mysteriously deleted deaths in August (one was a 9-year-old boy who died in June 2020). The official reason for the raid was that someone had “illegally hacked into [the Florida DOH’s] emergency alert messaging system,” said a state law enforcement officer. But Jones wasn’t having it. “This was DeSantis,” she tweeted. “He sent the gestapo.” She sued the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for various reasons, including for violating her right to free speech and due process. (FDLE denied the lawsuit allegations and called its protocols that day “normal” in a statement, while DeSantis insisted it wasn’t a raid—it was a “valid process” conducted with “integrity.”) Jones denied—and still denies—that she was behind the mystery hacker’s unauthorized message, sent to nearly 1,800 government agency employees in November. “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead,” the message read. “You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.” Jones insists that if she’d sent the message, the data would have at least been right (the number of deaths was rounded down by 460). And the technology site Ars Technica reported that the health department’s emergency alert system—the one Jones is accused of hacking—used a password and username that had been widely shared on Reddit channels and was even publicly available on the Florida DOH site. The state claims it traced the message to Jones’s IP address. Jones claims they knew her IP address from when she worked from home. As usual, she is refusing to back down. “This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly,” she wrote on Twitter after the raid. “If DeSantis thought pointing a gun at my face was a good way to get me to shut up, he’s about to learn just how wrong he was.” The raid splashed her all over the news again. “The police released my home address and my cell phone number,” she says, “and the school my son went to. I got death threats to my home mailing address. I had a couple asshole reporters who would not leave my house no matter how much I politely asked them to.” She hired a bodyguard. There were rape threats, threats against her children. None of it made her want to back down, but at the same time, she admits, “I was actually terrified." In January, she was charged with a felony for allegedly accessing the state emergency message system. If convicted, she could face five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. By then, she had moved her family to the D.C. area, in hopes of putting this chapter behind them all and starting over. She had to return to Florida to turn herself in or else risk extradition. She drove the nearly 1,000 mile, two-day journey alone, determined to keep her kids from reexperiencing the trauma of policemen pounding down their door. It was days before Joe Biden’s inauguration. “Insurrectionists [are] planning attacks across the country this week and Florida is jailing scientists for the crimes of knowing and speaking,” she tweeted. “Censored by the state of Florida until further notice.”
Next week all of us under 65 can make vax appointments. That is a large chunk of people so its going to take awhile. I'll probably get my vax at Publix... lol. Its a little weird but it is working. I still wear a mask but mostly because I'm doing some glass work for some new friends. The local pastime here seems to be buying huge salvage catamarans in the Bahamas, roughly patching any holes and towing them back to the Treasure Coast with no engines or rigging. They generally buy two of the identical boat model which is very clever because you can make a mold from the good boat to repair damage on the other boat of the pair. There are boatyards everywhere here intermingled with marine hardware stores and boat manufacturers. Its a great place to repair/refit. People here saw the glass fab work on my boat and realized I know how to make large structural repairs. I'm working on a pair of Lagoon 450s right now. They have already been flipped at great profit and they are still on the hard and not even engined yet. My continued involvement could lead to ownership of a large cat if I see a great deal. I've had the same boat since I was 23 years old and love the old scow so its a little painful for me to consider upsizing particularly after I've spent a lot of money upgrading and refitting recently but that is usually how it goes, right? I have catamaran experience (that is one way to put it) but I never liked cats for blue water sailing. People think they are resistant to knockdowns but actually the opposite is true. They are more inclined to flip and once capsized they are difficult or impossible to right by yourself. Also they are expensive to haul out and moor. But they are freaking huge and comfortable and stupid fast, totally next level compared to my old mono-hull. You can literally outrun weather in a large catamaran. I obviously love Florida. In many ways it has exceeded my expectations. I'm ignoring ETers, family and friends who have developed an intense irrational hatred towards this beautiful place. After years of putting up with leftists in my life I'm doing as I please. Let them howl from afar.
Oh look at who will refuse to extradite a indicted criminal so he can gain politically... Trump allies counting on Ron DeSantis to refuse extradition to New York if ex-president gets indicted https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-donald-trump/ Donald Trump could be in real trouble back in New York, where he lived and worked most of his life -- and the former president's allies are hoping the governor in his new home state will bail him out. Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance Jr. has cranked up the heat on his investigation into Trump's dealings before his tenure ends, and he'll likely be forced to decide whether to charge the twice-impeached one-term president before leaving office -- but Trump allies see a possible out, reported The New Yorker. "Among his social circle in Palm Beach, speculation abounds that Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, an ally, might not honor an extradition request from New York if a bench warrant were issued for Trump's arrest," reported the magazine's Jane Mayer. Trump has managed to skate on a number of alleged crimes and misdemeanors -- including two House impeachments in just over a year -- but legal experts say he might not be able to defy an extradition order, with or without help from DeSantis, who did not respond to a request for comment on the report. Extradition is a constitutional duty, according to Dave Aronberg, the state's attorney for Palm Beach County, and a governor's role in the process is "ministerial" -- although he conceded nothing was certain where Trump was concerned. "You know what? I thought Jan. 6 would go smoothly," Aronberg said. "Congress' role was just ministerial then, too."