Florida's GOP strongholds buck DeSantis on virus measures https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...p-strongholds-buck-desantis-on-virus-measures MELBOURNE BEACH, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is facing resistance from a growing number of Republican-leaning counties over his handling of the recent surge in COVID-19 infections, in a rare bipartisan rebuke of the governor’s laissez faire approach to the pandemic. A number of school districts have moved to implement mask mandates for students in recent weeks in defiance of a July executive order from DeSantis that barred school officials from putting such requirements in place. And while most of those mandates originated in more liberal parts of the state, a handful of conservative-leaning areas have joined in. At the same time, DeSantis is still locked in a battle with Florida’s lucrative cruise industry over a ban on so-called vaccine passports as a growing number of major cruise lines announce plans to require passengers to provide proof of vaccination. The backlash underscores the political perils posed by the pandemic, even for a rising Republican star like DeSantis, who is up for reelection next year and is seen as a possible contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Florida is experiencing one of its darkest moments since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year as the more contagious delta variant tears its way across the state. As of Sunday, Florida was averaging more than 21,000 new infections each day, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s Covid Data Tracker. More than 16,000 people are currently hospitalized, according to a Friday update from the Florida Hospital Association that showed a slight downward trend. “Fingers crossed, we may be seeing the beginning of a downward trend in COVID-19 hospitalizations, but new cases remain near all-time highs, so it is much too early to declare victory,” said Florida Hospital Association President and CEO Mary Mayhew. COVID-19 cases have surged in Florida despite a major push by the state for vaccinations. Florida currently ranks 20th among all 50 states and the District of Columbia in residents who have received at least one dose of a vaccine. More recently, DeSantis has taken to promoting a COVID-19 antibody treatment sold by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron as a way to fight the delta variant. “COVID is going to be with us. You have tools to be able to best protect yourself,” he said at a news conference on Monday touting the antibody treatment. “Obviously, from a prevention perspective, the vaccination. But then if you are infected, particularly if you’re high risk, then what do you do? And this has just got to be something that everyone knows about.” Still, DeSantis, who has been lauded by conservatives for his resistance to some of the strictest COVID-19-related measures, has largely hewed to a laissez faire approach to the outbreak. He backed legislation earlier this year effectively preempting local governments from imposing their own pandemic restrictions. But the fight over pandemic-related rules and mandates has played out most prominently in the state’s public schools. DeSantis signed an executive order late last month banning school districts from implementing mask mandates – a move that has been the subject of increasing resistance from school boards, superintendents and many parents. Roughly a dozen of the state’s 67 school districts have bucked DeSantis on the mask mandate ban. In recent days, more conservative counties have begun to make moves of their own. On Monday, school board members in Brevard County – an area that DeSantis carried by nearly 17 points in the 2018 gubernatorial election – voted 3-2 to institute a 30-day mandatory mask policy. The meeting came after a Friday ruling by a Florida judge allowing school districts to impose strict mask mandates, dealing a blow to DeSantis who had argued that such decisions should be left up to individual parents. One Brevard School Board member, Misty Belford, had previously voted against a mask policy before joining two other members in approving the mandate on Monday. She said that while she expects the DeSantis administration to appeal the judge’s ruling, the decision gave school board members “a small window to try to interrupt the spread” of the virus. “We have a very serious crisis on our hands,” Belford said. “I think that we have a very small window of opportunity to do something to break this cycle and get some relief.” Also on Monday, the superintendent of the school district in Lee County, a deep-red part of Southwest Florida, announced a 30-day mask mandate for all students and staff beginning on Wednesday. The decisions out of Brevard and Lee came on the same day that public schools in two other Republican strongholds, Sarasota County and Indian River County, began enforcing similar mask mandates for students. In each of the counties, students are able to opt out of the requirements with a signed note from a medical professional. The DeSantis administration hasn’t taken the resistance to the governor’s executive order lying down. Despite the judge’s ruling, the Florida Department of Education on Monday followed through on a threat to withhold funds from two school districts – Broward County and Alachua County – that imposed mask mandates. “We’re going to fight to protect parent’s rights to make health care decisions for their children,” state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran said in a statement. “They know what is best for their children.” To be sure, DeSantis remains well-liked among Florida Republicans more broadly. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found his approval rating among GOP voters at an overwhelming 87 percent, while only 8 percent said they disapprove of his job performance. And the recent COVID-19 surge doesn’t appear to have hurt DeSantis’s fundraising capabilities. Friends of Ron DeSantis, the governor’s political committee, raised nearly $5 million between Aug. 1 and Aug. 27. By comparison, the two main Democrats challenging DeSantis in next year’s gubernatorial election, Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, have raised just over $3.2 million this year combined. But the Quinnipiac poll also suggests some trouble for DeSantis, with his overall approval rating falling below the 50 percent mark to 47 percent. That’s still better than the 41 percent approval he notched in a July 2020 Quinnipiac survey, but it’s still well below his pre-pandemic high of 59 percent in March 2019. When it comes to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, however, DeSantis’s approval rating drops even lower to 46 percent, while he gets 44 percent approval for his handling of Florida’s public schools. The poll also found that 60 percent of Floridians support masking requirements for students, teachers and school staff. DeSantis’s administration is also caught in another high-profile battle against the cruise industry as a growing number of cruise operators unveil vaccination requirements for passengers. The Republican-controlled state legislature passed a measure earlier this year at DeSantis’s urging prohibiting businesses from requiring patrons to provide proof of vaccination. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings sued over the law, and a federal judge handed down a ruling earlier this month allowing the company to require vaccinations for its passengers. DeSantis’s office has vowed to appeal the ruling. But that hasn’t stopped other cruise operators in the state from implementing their own requirements. So far Disney, Royal Caribbean, Carnival and MSC Cruises have announced vaccine requirements. Those decisions were influenced by an emergency order by the Bahamas effectively barring cruise ships from stopping in the country unless all eligible passengers are vaccinated. The Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that a majority of Floridians – 63 percent – support vaccine requirements for cruise ship passengers.
Wow, you really are dense. Why do you continue to use incomplete data to make false claims about Covid in Florida ? You truly have no understanding of the data you keep posting. The 7 day average for deaths has gone up every week the last 3 weeks. Yet you still claim the peak was August 12th. Fuck your dumb. It's been obvious for more then a year you don't give a shit how many die or get critically ill due to this virus.
Maybe you need to carefully read the Miami Herald article on why Florida is reporting declining deaths in recent weeks -- but the deaths are not actually declining. Read the article and get back to us. Here is a reminder -- Florida reported 'artificial decline' in COVID-19 deaths as cases were surging https://thehill.com/homenews/state-...cial-decline-in-covid-19-deaths-as-cases-were
Again, you are incredibly dense. Your chart severely undercounts the actual death counts. This is public domain knowledge for anyone but yourself that chooses to be willfully ignorant. Over and over and over again ... .
You don't know whether they are declining or not, because you don't know what the future brings in numbers of deaths. But between a topping of cases and the MCAB treatments, it is a good hypothesis.
Ah, sure. Well, if you've got some proof showing the "severely undercounted" deaths or some other information that is data related and not hysterics like normal, I'm all ears.
Nice tourism industry you had there -- too bad DeSantis f@cked it all up. Florida’s Covid Resurgence Threatens Tourism Industry https://www.barrons.com/articles/florida-covid-cases-travel-industry-51630446326
A tale of two governors: COVID outcomes in Florida and Connecticut show that leadership matters https://fortune.com/2021/08/31/covi...ates-vaccination-hospitalization-death-rates/ Executive power is often circumscribed by complex geopolitical dynamics, volatile financial markets, disruptive new technologies, and tragic natural disasters. But key leaders still can have a profound impact—positive or negative—on millions of constituents. A comparison of Florida’s and Connecticut’s governors in their contrasting approach to the resurgence of the coronavirus reveals the consequential potential of individual leaders. This summer, tragic public-health news was exacerbated by historic levels of political grandstanding by several Southern state governors. The rapid spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant was driven by a surge of new cases in Florida, Texas, and Missouri—as these states accounted for an astounding 40% of new U.S. coronavirus cases despite representing only 17% of the nation’s population. Ignoring science and evidence, the governors of these three states have taken a rigid, cynical stance, forbidding vaccine mandates by employers and mandatory indoor mask usage—even in cases where such mandates were intended to protect young schoolchildren ineligible for vaccines. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis even threatened to cut off funding and educators’ salaries for schools that required protective masks in compliance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. Nonetheless, 10 school districts defied DeSantis by issuing mask mandates. Similarly, Disney, Carnival Cruise Line, and Royal Caribbean joined Norwegian Cruise Line in defiance of DeSantis’s ban on passenger vaccination passports, despite being threatened with fines of $5,000 for each such violation of his decree. Florida’s hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units are now reaching capacity, with 90% of ICU beds occupied, the majority of them by COVID patients. More than 90% of these inpatients are unvaccinated; overall only one-third of Floridians between ages 12 and 64 are vaccinated. DeSantis’s response to such wide swaths of the unvaccinated Florida population suffering from the highly contagious Delta variant has been to consult with anti-mask advocates who promote the horse parasite drug ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, unproven elixirs, instead of scientifically developed, safe, and highly effective vaccines. In contrast, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has been relying on a science-based approach from the outset of the pandemic. He pulled together globally renowned virologists, microbiologists, epidemiologists, and business leaders in March of 2020, just as the pandemic was declared, and kept such advisory panels working to solve problems by relying on science, evidence, and smart management, independent of ideology. Accordingly, he worked with both top Trump administration and later top Biden administration leaders to keep manufacturing flowing without a day’s interruption, ensuring the needed supply of protective material to open schools early. Lamont also catalyzed a new nationwide weekly meeting of the nation’s governors, favoring quiet, effective, bipartisan, cross-sector problem-solving instead of seeking the public limelight. As Lamont recently explained, “Our reopen committee included the scientists and the big business leaders that we needed to help us, and I’ve tried to do that throughout state government—get a wider variety of people at the table.” He did not mock scientists, intimidate public officials, or threaten business leaders as foils for political grandstanding. This resulted in the nation’s highest or second highest vaccination rates for every age group, from 75% upward—including 90% of seniors—and one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the nation (Connecticut is 35th out of 50 by that measure). This focused approach to problem-solving and collaborative leadership style allowed Lamont to call for vaccine mandates in schools, nursing homes, and for all state employees recently—astoundingly without protest from unions, partisan political leaders of either party, or business leaders. Lamont pointed to heat maps of Southern state infections with overflowing hospitals and declared, “Sadly, in many cases, they have hospitals in different regions who are overwhelmed or close to being overwhelmed. We’re not gonna let that happen in Connecticut, and that is not happening in Connecticut.” Just glancing at the two contrasting CDC charts of public health outcomes for Florida versus Connecticut below—showing the impact of the same disease, in the same country, over the same time period—illustrates the difference leaders can make. Even though Connecticut was hard hit in the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, the post-vaccine outcomes are dramatically different. This difference is not explained by age patterns: The average age in both states is about 41 years old, but the health outcomes of Connecticut residents tower over those of Floridians in every age bracket. Florida COVID deaths, year to date Connecticut COVID deaths, year to date As the Delta variant rages across the country, the divergence of health outcomes is especially notable between the Northeast and the South. The map below shows that the divergence between Connecticut and Florida is reflected in a wider region surrounding each state. A year and a half into the pandemic, we have accumulated a great deal of knowledge and experience in designing effective public health responses. The divergence of health outcomes across the country is the result not of differences in the prevalence of the Delta variant, population demographics, access to health care, or environmental conditions; it is attributable at this point principally to differences in leadership. Leadership matters. Leadership matters not only in determining the effectiveness of government’s response to the public health crisis, but in shaping both individual opinions and the sense of common purpose. Ideological extremism has caused needless deaths in our country. It is tragic that political differences among the states have resulted in a sharp divergence with respect to health-protective behaviors—vaccination and masking among them. Ideological differences and bitter political rivalries exist in all democracies, and individual attitudes toward vaccination and masking vary widely within all regions of the world, but nowhere else are these attitudes as closely aligned with political ideologies as they have become in the U.S. The U.K., India, and Israel are just three examples: In each country, the pandemic remains a grave danger, but each country’s political cleavages, no less intractable than in the U.S., are largely unrelated to health-protective behaviors. In the U.S., the political reinforcement of resistance to public health measures has hardened individual attitudes, as shown in the chart below, worsening the pandemic and its impact on American lives and the economy. The contrasting leadership approaches between the governors of Connecticut and Florida are not explainable by educational sophistication: Each governor holds college and graduate school degrees from both Harvard and Yale. The differences are not explained by credentials but rather by competence and character. Ron DeSantis is a smart person cynically willing to play the role of an anti-intellectual for political gain, while Ned Lamont is trying to do his job to save the lives of his constituents, seeking the best scientific knowledge and evidence we have gathered on the pandemic. As Walt Disney, one of the business leaders who shaped modern Florida, once said, “Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised.”