"DeSantis for the win" -- hiding the data that doesn't back his claims Gov. DeSantis believes state’s contact tracing program didn’t work; insiders push back against claims Fla. DOH has not released details to us, despite nearly a dozen requests https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/...-didnt-work-insiders-push-back-against-claims Nearly one year after we first revealed how the state’s tracing program was riddled with concerns and shrouded in secrecy, the Governor declared the program didn’t work. Is he right? Investigative Reporter Katie LaGrone reports. Last month, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis declared the state’s contact tracing program didn’t work. “I think we have to admit that contact tracing just didn’t work,” he told a crowd during a press conference in Palm Harbor. “I think it’s largely been ineffective,” he said. DeSantis’ words come as a bit of a surprise given state leaders had been touting the practice and Florida’s health department has poured tens of millions of dollars into expanding the program which still appears to be shrouded in secrecy. Health leaders tout contact tracing From the beginning of the pandemic, the state’s top doctor touted the practice. “Testing also goes hand in hand with what we call contact tracing,” Dr. Scott Rivkees said during a press conference last May. “This is actually the way we stop the cycle of transmission from person to person,” Rivkees said. But the centuries-old tool that traces an infected person’s physical contacts to help stop the spread of dangerous diseases soon became a focal point of scrutiny in the state. Not enough tracers Contact tracing experts say in order for the practice to be successful, communities need to start early and have enough tracers doing the work. Experts say, at minimum, there should be at least 30 tracers per 100,000 people. At the time, Florida started touting its contact tracing efforts as a way to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the state, the health department had 1,100 tracers working on it. Far below the recommended number needed given Florida’s population is around 21 million people. “We had to scurry to hire epidemiologists because we didn’t have as man employed as we should have,” said Senator Janet Cruz back in May of 2020. As the program continued, so did reports of problems. People contacted us to let us know they never received a phone call from a tracer. Florida Senator Shevrin Jones, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 last summer, told us how he received a phone call, but when the phone disconnected during his conversation with a tracer, the tracer never called him back. “We need a new system,” he said about the state’s contact tracing program at the time. With cases surging in some local communities, elected leaders including Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, deemed the state’s contact tracing efforts a failure. “I’ve called it a failure, I’ve called it ineffective, I’ve called it the equivalent of not having a program,” Gelber said. Shrouded in secrecy Despite nearly a dozen requests we’ve made over the past 9 months, we still don’t know how many people have been successfully called, traced or even how the state measures its success. Requests for data related to the state’s contact tracing program haven’t been fulfilled and the health department’s spokespeople haven’t answered data-related questions about the program. This brings us back to the Governor’s recent sentiments. “Unfortunately, it’s not been something that’s been terribly effective here in Florida or throughout the country,” DeSantis said about contact tracing. But just how ineffective contact tracing has been in Florida, we don’t know. The state health department nor local county health departments, which do most of the tracing work, continue to not give up details on the data it collected. The cold shoulder, not just towards us. Questions about data collected Dr. Thomas Hladish is a University of Florida research scientist. He was hired by Florida’s Department of Health last spring to help forecast the virus using data. At one point, he said he asked about the state’s contact tracing data. “At the time I was told the folks involved and responsible for the contact tracing program didn’t have time to talk to us about what they were doing because all of their resources were allocated to containment,” Hladish said. He agrees with the Governor that contact tracing efforts didn’t successfully stop the virus from spreading. But he still believes in the practice of contact tracing if it’s done properly and thoroughly, which in Florida remains questionable. Former contact tracer Dalton Price worked for the health department in Volusia County for 4 months last year. By summer, he said, the caseload of people to call was overwhelming. “When the surge happened in Florida, It was very clear that we [Florida] were not prepared. We were so behind that people, by the time we reached out to them, had already been done with their 10-day or 14-day quarantine,” he said. Price also explained that to speed up the contact tracing process, the state reduced its 4-page contact tracing questionnaire down to two. “Success was how quickly we could put this basic information into the system,” he said. Price also said about 20% of the people he contacted did not want to cooperate with tracing. This might help why the state has been less than transparent in releasing its contact tracing data. Still, Price takes issue with the Governor’s conclusions about the program. “I think, overall, it was successful,” some say Price believes the program has been a success. “I don’t agree with DeSantis. I would say the shortcomings, the holes and gaps were largely brought upon by his administration’s response in Florida, which largely denounced the pandemic and infused distrust in the public health response we saw,” said Price. “I think what the Governor was saying was a blanket statement that was a bit misleading,” said University of South Florida public health expert Dr. Marissa Levine. Levine wasn’t involved in the state’s contact tracing program but believes contact tracing helped keep the state open, especially at schools. “Contact tracing helped us see that cases related to school children did not come from the schools themselves, they came from the community,” she said. Everyone agrees the state started tracing too late, it took too long for it to expands its contact tracing program, and what exactly the state’s data shows remains a big unknown a year and tens of millions of contact tracing dollars later. Meantime, the state’s contact tracing program continues.
The variants are generally more infectious but less deadly. That's a highly robust virological reality. Not quite a certainty, but it's got a law-like cause-effect relationship. Why? A more deadly pathogen kills its host before it spreads. A less deadly one spreads before it kills or takes out the host because a less sick host will not self-isolate or be avoided, therefore the pathogen is ipso facto more contagious precisely because it is less deadly. That is true of Covid.
Another wealthy town in Florida following DeSantis' mandate to not give vaccines to the poors. Wealthy Florida town said its vaccines were ‘residents only.’ https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article250531969.html Golden Beach, a tiny coastal town in northeast Miami-Dade County and one of the most affluent municipalities in South Florida, announced this week that it had obtained about 150 doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine from the state of Florida — and that they were for Golden Beach residents only. “Participants MUST be live-in Residents of Golden Beach and must present ID,” read a flyer about the Friday event at Town Hall. “Anyone found not RESIDING in Golden Beach will have their appointment canceled.” The town’s promotion of “residents only” shots came with the express permission of the state, Town Manager Alex Diaz told the Miami Herald. But the town opened up access after the Herald began asking questions. And on Friday, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Emergency Management disputed that the state authorized Golden Beach to make shots available only to its roughly 1,000 residents. “All Florida residents who qualify per the [Food and Drug Administration] are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at any location in Florida. All state sites, federal sites and county health department sites are open to any Floridian from any county,” said spokesman Jason Mahon. “The state did not authorize Golden Beach to restrict vaccine access.” The dispute over whether Golden Beach was allowed to make its vaccines available only to residents of a community where the median household income is nearly four times that of Miami-Dade County comes as Gov. Ron DeSantis dismisses allegations that Florida’s vaccine rollout has benefited wealthy, exclusive enclaves. According to Diaz, the town was allowed to limit who got their vaccines under a “closed point of distribution” (or “closed POD”) agreement executed in January with the Florida Department of Health. Closed POD agreements let an entity distribute vaccines to a specific population, rather than the general public. Such arrangements have been utilized in Florida to limit vaccine events to certain vulnerable populations, like teachers, police officers, or the residents of particular gated senior living communities. But they generally have not been used by municipalities to distribute resident-only doses. For instance, in January, when Miami Mayor Francis Suarez pushed for his city’s vaccines to be limited to city residents, the response from Florida Emergency Management Director Jared Moskowitz was clear: “You can’t do that.” So far, state officials have offered no indication that the policy has changed, said Frank Rollason, the director of emergency management for Miami-Dade County. “We meet with the state all the time and they tell us you can’t do this,” he said. Rollason, who learned about the Golden Beach vaccine event from a reporter Tuesday, said he contacted town officials and told them “you can’t do this.” In response, Diaz pointed to the agreement between the town and the Florida Department of Health. The agreement Diaz told the Miami Herald the town’s closed POD agreement said it could give COVID vaccines to town employees, their families, and town residents. Mayor Glenn Singer went a step further, saying in an interview that “part of the stipulation was it had to be for your residents only. They made it clear on that.” But a copy of the agreement provided to the Herald doesn’t address residency. Instead, it says that, out of 450 vaccines the town was requesting at the time, an estimated 150 would go to “employees, contractors and essential personnel,” 150 would go to “employee family members,” and 150 would go to “patients and students.” Diaz said he wasn’t sure what was meant by “patients and students” — there’s no hospital in Golden Beach — but he suggested it may have been a “typo” and that it was “supposed to be residents.” Golden Beach had been waiting for doses of the vaccine since Jan. 15, when it became one of the first municipalities in Miami-Dade to reach an agreement with the state. This week, “after waiting months ... like everyone else,” Diaz said state officials notified the town that it would receive 150 to 200 one-shot Johnson & Johnson doses to distribute pursuant to the closed POD agreement. On Tuesday, Golden Beach residents began booking appointments through One Milo, a Miami-based company that is running the vaccine event. Singer said town officials checked the names and addresses people provided against the town’s tax roll to ensure that only Golden Beach residents were signing up. The next day, after being contacted by the Herald, Diaz said that about 50 slots were still available and that the town would no longer be turning away non-residents. A subsequent email and revised flyer removed language about the residency requirement, and Diaz said he called two Aventura residents Wednesday who had inquired about the event the day before and told them to sign up. About 40 appointments remained open on the sign-up website Friday morning, hours before the event began. “The Town’s vaccine registration has been open to anyone who wishes to register, and will continue to do so until all slots have been taken,” Diaz said in an email Friday while the event was ongoing. “For a few hours on the first day of registration the site was available for the population we identified in our closed pod agreement.” Diaz said even with the reduced number of shots, demand for the event wasn’t as high as the town had expected. “Our expectation was we’d have demand from our own community,” he said. “The reality is, it seems like most of my community has already been vaccinated or is choosing not to.” Millions of Floridians not yet vaccinated A lot has changed in Florida’s vaccine landscape since January, when vaccines were less prevalent and access to them was highly restricted. Now that every adult is eligible, the competition at pop-up sites and pharmacies is far less fierce. Still, as of Wednesday, about two-thirds of Florida’s population had yet to receive a COVID vaccine shot, according to state data. And Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to fend off allegations that the wealthy and politically connected have gotten a leg up in the race for protection from the deadly COVID virus, spending the week railing against a critical 60 Minutes report. But with some municipalities getting approved to distribute vaccines after months of waiting — and millions of Floridians not yet vaccinated — the question of whether local officials can cut off outsiders from accessing their doses is only becoming more relevant. ohn Pate, the city manager in Opa-locka — which is one of Miami-Dade’s poorest cities and had one of its lowest vaccination rates as of late January — said the city applied for a closed POD about a month ago and has yet to be approved. A state-sponsored walk-up site opened in the city in late March, providing about 200 shots a day to any eligible Floridian. Limiting vaccines to Opa-locka residents “wasn’t even a thought of ours,” Pate said. “I wouldn’t believe they would allow us ... I don’t think we were trying to restrict vaccinations from anybody.” This isn’t the first time a move by Golden Beach to restrict access to services has raised questions. The town, which consists entirely of single-family homes and no commercial businesses, has long considered its public beach closed to non-residents. And a year ago, as COVID-19 spread through South Florida, the town temporarily banned visitors from entering and set up a checkpoint.
https://www.breitbart.com/science/2...r-capita-than-new-york-pennsylvania-michigan/ Florida is crushing New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan on a per capita basis, all fascist lockdown states. It will be interesting to see future studies that may conclude that masking and lockdowns were the wrong thing to do and that all the other problems that stem from lockdowns from economic devastation to lost education were simply unnecessary.
Florida newspaper blasts DeSantis's ban on COVID-19 passports: 'Makes no sense' https://thehill.com/homenews/media/...tiss-ban-on-covid-19-passports-makes-no-sense The editorial board of Florida-based newspaper The Palm Beach Post on Friday blastedGov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) executive order banning COVID-19 “vaccine passports." The editorial comes as several state governors in recent weeks have taken actions to limit coronavirus passports — a document that provides proof of vaccination to give people access to larger crowded events such as weddings, parties, etc. DeSantis issued an executive order in early April preventing government entities and private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. He has argued that doing so infringes on individual freedom. “The governor's argument makes no sense. The issue before us is one of public health. And there is no question that vaccinations are the most effective weapon against COVID-19 yet devised,” the board wrote. “By preventing Floridians to distinguish between who is vaccinated and who is not, DeSantis is telling us to be content with prolonging the pandemic.” The board noted that some entities, like the cruise industry, sports leagues, theme parks and conventions might challenge the order. It further stated DeSantis' argument was "puzzling," noting that it goes against the premise of his entire COVID-19 response to date. "The governor’s entire COVID-19 response has been based on the idea that it’s best to trust people to do the right thing without the government telling them what to do," it wrote. "Not here. Suddenly, DeSantis isn’t content to forbid government from demanding a 'vaccine passport.' He doesn’t want businesses to make that decision for themselves, either," it continued. The newspaper said that it would have understood barring state and local governments form requiring proof of vaccination, but not private businesses. “If DeSantis had merely forbidden Florida’s state and local governments from issuing vaccination passports, we would have understood, though perhaps not agreed,” the board wrote. “But DeSantis' decision also forbidding private entities from requiring proof of inoculation is just bizarre, and goes way too far.” The Hill has reached out to DeSantis for comment.
DeSantis holds another round-table with COVID-denying idiots... Watch Live: Gov. DeSantis holds roundtable Monday with "public health experts" https://www.firstcoastnews.com/arti...perts/77-f2ec4b5c-c673-43fc-ae7f-e582e898d718 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will hold a roundtable with public health experts in Tallahassee on Monday. DeSantis will be joined by Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff.